Week 136 Photo Challenge: Fairy Tale

It took all of us a month to come up with photos for the Week 135 photo challenge.  At that end of that post back on March 1st, I wrote that it might take us another month to pull together photos for the week 136 challenge.  

Looks like I wasn't wrong, it's been just over a month since that last photo challenge post. Grad Girl is still pretty swamped with trying to finish up grad school and I just couldn't come up with any ideas for how to approach this challenge.  Only My Guy had any photos. He wanted to move on, so I promised to figure something out and post whatever we had today.  These aren't the best photos we've taken, but they work.  

I finally took a few photos, but absolutely nothing was working for me.  So I got creative. 

Kate: Sleeping Beauty (and her cat)

This is not AI created. Wish I could blame it on that, but I did this with one of my photos and My Memory Suites. It's far from perfect, but it strangely works. At least I think it does. As My Guy said last night, we set the rules. I'm just glad to be done with this challenge. 

My Guy made a special trip out last night to get a toy for his photos. I think it paid off.  

My Guy: Classic Tale

That's one large frog and one small princess (Also known for her sleep habits, sense a theme?).  I don't know where he got the doll, but he improvised really well.  

Grad Girl has been insanely busy and stressed.  She really hasn't had much creativity to spare since she's trying to write her thesis.  So I went through the photos she's texted over the last month and picked one that worked if you had the right point of view. 

Grad Girl:  Rosina Leckermaul's Pantry

If you don't know who Rosina Leckermaul is, that's the name given to the witch from Hansel and Greta in an opera from 1892. The German translation of the name is Raisin Sweet-Tooth. The witch is given no name in the original story, but is also known as the Gingerbread Hag (thank you Google).  Grad Girl sent me this picture with the question, "Am I getting an Easter basket this year?". She dearly loves Peeps.  

So that's our efforts for this challenge. Did we do it justice?  I'm hoping it at least gave you a smile.  Sometimes that's the best kind of picture.  My Guy drew the next challenge card.

When I told Grad Girl what the next challenge was she texted "Oh good, an easy one". My sentiments exactly!  

2025 Quilting Ambitions: 1st Quarter Check In

The beginning of April is also the end of the first quarter of 2025. The year is already one third over. At the beginning of the year I wrote up my ambitions for the year. It's easy to get caught up in the every day and completely forget what you actually intended to do with your year. So it's definitely time to look back and see if I'm on track and following the plan. To do that I'm linking up with Quilting Jetgirl for her 2025 Quilting Q1 Check In.  

The first few months of 2025 went by quickly. Most of that time was focused on finishing up quilt alongs that started either last year or early this year.  So some of my goals didn't get much attention during first quarter, but that seems to be my normal.  I'm slower out of the gate on some.  Here's where things stood at the end of March. 

Ambition 1:  Make quilts.  The goal is to actually make as much progress as I can on my quilt plan for 2025.  Here's the plan for 2025. 

Here's how it looked at the end of March. 

Three quilts have moved to finished quilt tops and a fourth is at the assembly stage. Not bad progress for the first quarter.  If I can move every bar even a little this year, it will have been a good year.  

Ambition 2: Learn to quilt. I've been challenging myself with this goal for the last 2 years. I'm going to get serious about that this month since I have a break in quilt alongs. My fingers first typed that there was no progress on this goal yet, but then I remembered Grad Girl's second "learning to sewing" project. 

 

Back at the guild retreat in January, Grad Girl used this cute little kitty pattern to make a trivet.  I layered it with backing and batting and tried quilting it just using my normal machine set up.  It ended up being a bit wonky and we had to trim a bit off. Still it doesn't look horrible.  I did learn why a walking foot is recommended for quilting.  She made two of these, the second one still needs to be quilted. That will likely be my first practice project with the walking foot once I finish practicing a bit.  (By the way, she loves this trivet and uses it all the time in her kitchen. She wants to make some for her dad for next Christmas. Hopefully, I'll be up to speed by then).  

Ambition 3: Fabric Organization. I've been so busy with quilt alongs during the first quarter that I've done nothing on this goal. Last year I didn't make good progress on this goal till second quarter.  Looks like that will be the case this year too.  

Though I didn't have any official ambitions around new experiences, I do have two for the quarter.  One is learning how to write quilt patterns.  I started that process back in December with doing a simple block pattern. A whole quilt pattern is more of the same, but has some unique challenges. The second new experience is going on a shop hop. It was interesting, but it was a lot of driving!  

This year is off to a good start on the goal front. Hopefully I can keep it up.  Second quarter will be over before we know it.  

March 2025 PHD report

We are a few days into April so it's time to look back at what got done last month and post a March PHD report and join the linky party over at Ms P Designs USA.  I appreciate these monthly look backs, especially when I have no finishes.  It helps me remember that I did actually do stuff even though there are no updates to my PHD tracking sheet.

No new starts either, so I'm at least not adding to my UFO list yet. There was some good progress on several projects this month.  

An oldie, but goodie made it back to my active project list in March. On Ringo Lake was the Bonnie Hunter mystery back in 2017. When I last worked on in January of 2019, 28 of the 30 blocks were finished.  The last two blocks were assembled pretty quickly and assembly was started. In an effort to just get this project to finished quilt top, simple sashing rather than Bonnie's pieced sashing is the plan.    

Wild and Goosey (Bonnie Hunter) has been my Rainbow Scrap Challenge project for several years now.  Last year all the yellow and orange blocks were finished. The red blocks are almost done, but I still need a lot of the blue, purple, teal and green.  Since yellow was the color for March, I combined the yellow blocks into bigger blocks for assembly into the quilt. I also continued making more blue blocks.  

My long term leaders and enders project, the Simply Sensational Summer Scrap Quilt (Kevin the Quilter) continued in March, but it switched from making 4 patches to actually starting to assemble the quilt.  I'm not sticking strictly to Kevin's layout, so I wanted to get that going and adjust the total of 4 patches needed as I go along.  There's been good progress on the center of the quilt so far.  

Marble Mystery (Meadow Mist Designs) became a finished quilt top early in the month.  

The April and May blocks were actually finished for the Guild BOM, but I can't show May's blocks till I reveal that color to the guild later this month. April's blocks were pink, it adds a nice spark to all the cool colors already finished.  I'm trying to work ahead a bit just in case life happens and I have trouble getting a given month's block finished.  

After finishing off the May block for the Guild BOM, I wanted to add back a project that needed the blocks pieced. The 2024 Bonnie Hunter Mystery, Old Town, was put aside to keep up with the SAHRR.  It's the one project I had a lot of the pieces cut for, so I pulled out the pieces for step 2 and step 5 to work on the last day of March. I'm almost halfway done with step 5.

Most of my sewing time in the first quarter of 2025 was focused on this year's Stay at Home Round Robin (Quilting Gail). I got the quilt top finished before the quilt parade.  The backing is purchased and washed, but it still needs to be trimmed to size. Fingers crossed this will be my first finish for the year before the end of this month.  

As of the end of March, my progress tracker show four quilts with progress for 2025.  Two projects became quilt tops last month and one more shows good progress.  

So it was a good month on the progress front.  April's focus in the sewing room is to work on moving a couple of quilts towards finished. We'll see how that works out.  

To Do List for the Week of 04/01/2025

March was a pretty productive month, fingers crossed April is as well.  I did pretty well with my last to do list for March. 

To Do List for 03/25/2025

1.  2025 Guild BOM: Finish May blocks ✔

2.  2025 SAHRR: Trim backing - progress

3.  On Ringo Lake: Make 2 blocks, start quilt assembly ✔

4.  Wild and Goosey: Making blue blocks ✔

5.  Summer Scrap Quilt:  Leaders and enders ✔

Four out of five is definitely not a bad week.  Progress has been slow, but steady.  I'm hoping for more of the same for this week's to do list. 

To Do List for 04/01/2025

1.  2025 SAHRR (Quilting Gail): Trim backing, start prepping quilt top

I was able to get the backing with 25% off on Saturday. It's got both the green and the blue, so works well with the quilt top. It's been washed, but needs to be pressed before it's trimmed to size.  I'd like to get this project sent out for quilting before mid month, so I'll start prepping the quilt once the backing is ready.  

2. On Ringo Lake (Bonnie Hunter): Finish quilt assembly, start borders

Just one more row to add and the two halves can be sewn together. I'm happy with how this project is coming together. It feels good to get another of my older projects close to being a finished quilt top. 

3.  Kate's Choice: Learn to use walking foot and practice quilting

  

I finished the blocks for this sampler in August of last year.  One of goals the last couple of years has been to learn to quilt.  Trudy, who has done such a wonderful job with my quilts the last 10 plus years, is retiring from the quilting for others business sometime this year. She's going to quilt the 2025 SAHRR for me, but that's probably the last one she'll do.  So it's definitely time for me to learn.  I have several smaller quilt tops intended for donation that will look perfectly fine with straight line quilting.  So I'm going to start the learning process with figuring out how to use my walking foot.  I have one, I've just never used it. Getting the quilting going on the Kate's Choice blocks is my Chookshed Challenge project for April.  

4.  2025 Guild BOM: Cut fabrics for the June blocks

I'm trying to work ahead on this project so that if life happens, I'm still ready to go, plus it will help give me a head start on getting the quilt assembled to show in December/January.  

5.  Wild and Goosey (Bonnie Hunter): Finish blue, start teal blocks

I'll probably need to cut some more teal scraps, there aren't very many left in the bag from last year.   

6.  Simply Sensational Summer Scrap Quilt (Kevin the Quilter): Continue as leaders and enders. 

Looks like I'm back to a longer list this week.  We'll see how well I do at getting it all checked off.  

Linking up with the Quilt Schmilt for To Do Tuesday.