Weekend Stitching: A Little of This and That

Weekends are just never long enough.  I'm not sure what happened to Saturday, it just evaporated it seems.  Sunday we spent the day in Tulsa celebrating the Scientist in Training's birthday with lunch at PF Changs, followed by cheesecake elsewhere.  It was a fun day in spite of the cold rain that fell most of the day.  

I did get in some stitching.  All the rows of Geek Chic are sewn together, so that much got wrapped and given to the SIT with her other gifts.  She loved it.  Now to get the border on it and get the backing pieced so it can go out for quilting.  There wasn't time for photos before it was wrapped, hopefully I'll have some later this week.  

Two more Perkioman Valley blocks from the Ventura Modern Quilt Guild were finished. 

  
So these four will go out in the mail to Carol over at From My Carolina Home to be used in quilts for the California Thomas Fire victims. 

After playing around with the block pieces for Bonnie's On Ringo Lake mystery and staring at the options on the design wall, I finally decided to just make the blocks according to her directions.  

On Ringo Lake, Bonnie Hunter 2017 Mystery Quilt

The fabric choices this year didn't work really well. The gray is really too dark and doesn't show up against the black and boy the yellow really dominates the block.  It does look better with the sashing strips added. I'll use up the pieces that are already made and see how many blocks that makes and go from there.  

Linking up with the usual suspects for the Monday post:

Bonnie Hunter's Mystery Linky Party
Monday Making
Main Crush Monday
Design Wall Monday
BOMs Away

Weekend Stitching: Finally Progress!

Happy New Year!  We made it to midnight last night, barely.  My Guy and I celebrated with a small glass of wine and a toast to the new year, then went to bed.  We are such party people.  

The plan for last week was for lots of  afternoon sewing every day, but alas, life decided it had other plans.  I did finally make it to the sewing room for some weekend sewing late Friday afternoon.  Progress was made, but there's not much to show for it today.  The big priority was to get Geek Chic into a finished flimsy.  Not there yet, but I should get there today.  That project has to come off the design wall before the Scientist in Training gets home on Wednesday.  

Progress was made with On Ringo Lake, but I laid out the pieces for the block after Bonnie's clue on Sunday and didn't like it at all (so much so I'm not willing to share a photo at this point).  Bonnie revealed the final quilt today, I'm going to go play with pieces and see if I like it any better with all the sashing pieces added. If not, then I'll start moving the block pieces around and try some substitutions to see if I can get something else the works for me.  It's not Bonnie's design, my fabric choices didn't work very well. 

After that disappointment, the focus shifted to finishing up the blocks for December's One Monthly goal.  The commitment was only four blocks, but those little blocks have a lot of pieces.  Not quite a midnight hour finish, but it was almost 10 PM before all four were finished. I was the last one to join the December OMG linky.  

Twinkle Stars, Tutorial by Andrea Feldbush of Soscrappy

That completes all the blocks needed to finish the layout.  All the blocks are back in the project box and will come out to decorate the design wall later this year.  

One of my goals for 2018 is to do something with all my scraps. There is a call out for Perkioman Valley blocks to make quilts for the California Thomas Fire victims from the Ventura Modern Quilt Guild (that link is here).  I pulled my bags of 4.5"  and 5" scrap strips and went to work.  

Perkioman Valley Blocks for Thomas Fire Victims (instructions here)

 I only finished two blocks yesterday, but have plans to put a few more together today.  I'd like to get whatever blocks that are finished in the mail by Friday.  Carole, who blogs at My Carolina Home is also collecting the blocks and donations to make quilts for the victims (that post is here). 

I'm going to spend the rest of my New Year's Day in the sewing room, wrapping up 2017 stuff and resetting things for 2018 after my marathon of sewing yesterday.  I'm linking up with the usual Monday linky parties:

Monday Making
Main Crush Monday
Monday Design Wall
BOMs Away

Wishing everyone a productive and joyful 2018!