Flowers

Sewing is my main hobby obviously.  I no longer do any gardening, except for a few flower pots on my deck and porch.  I don't enjoy gardening or yard work, but I do enjoy having pretty flowers around in the summer.  I just wish every year that the gardening fairies would come plant them and keep them alive for me.  

Last Friday I stopped at 2 gardening centers in town and picked up a few plants.  This big pot has sometimes held a tomato plant but this year it has a red canna and some sweet potato vines.  And a solar light.  The smaller pot has zinnias and something called Egyptian papyrus.  I've never heard of that plant, but it looked interesting.   

The rolling pot has petunias, a rain gauge, and a couple of solar lights.  One solar light has a single LED butterfly that changes color all night long.  And there is a "spray" of solar flowers in several colors.

I've never had a gerber daisy before either, but this one was in the May basket exchange at guild last week.  The pot was a birthday gift last year from a gardening friend, along with the blue glass watering bulb.  You fill that glass bulb with water and stick it into the soil so it slowly keeps the soil moist.   

All of the previous pots are on our back deck, off the kitchen.  But in the front I have this gorgeous pink geranium sitting next to the steps.  And yes, that's a solar light hanging from the little pole.  Can you tell that I have a "thing" for solar lights?  

Small project update

I'm turning my attention to some small projects that would be easy to finish, starting with this red/white/blue table runner.  I finished the flimsy a couple of weeks ago, and now I have a plan for quilting it.  The top is sandwiched with batting and backing.  It's next up to quilt myself.

I have a weakness for kits, and this one I just bought.  There is no point in allowing it to languish in a drawer, so I got it sewn up already.  It's also sandwiched with batting and the backing included in the kit.  It's second in my quilting queue.

The 4 sunflower blocks for a wall hanging are done.  The leaf sections come next.

All of the pieces for those leaf sections have been cut.

I am happiest when I have hand work to do in the evenings.  Right now there is no binding to work on, but I do have a couple of projects in the hands of long arm quilters so there will be binding.  In the meantime I'm going to play with another EPP project.

Leanna (Not Afraid of Color) has been doing a spinning hexie for her Rainbow Scrap Challenge this year.  I'm really intrigued by these blocks, and have lots of the hexie papers and lots of scraps.  So of course I'm going to play.  You can see Leanna's blocks at this link: 

https://lapaylor.blogspot.com/2025/05/living-creative-life-paintings-fabric.html

There are other small projects that are on my list of course, but as long as I keep pushing a few forward at a time they'll eventually get done. 

Lone Star progress

One step closer to a quilt top . . .

The first of the background pieces are all sewn into the star quilt.  There were 8 Y seams to seal with, and I'm satisfied with them all now.  Only the first one had to be taken out and resewn. 

The dark grey looks much better in good light.  Now I need to decide on some borders, which I know will need those bright colors from the star.   

Design Wall Monday - May 12

I need to bring the star quilt back on top of my priority list this week.  It's time to add the background, and deal with those Y seams. 

One corner was done, but when I went to press it . . .

OOPS!!  That first Y seam didn't go well.  I had to just set it aside and do something else.  So this morning I'll be picking out the stitching and fix that corner.  Once those set-in background squares and triangles are in correctly, then I will begin to play with some border ideas.  I've spent a lot of time on Pinterest lately looking at a gazillion different options.  

Last week's Riley Blake block was called Give It a Whirl, and I like it so much that I knew it needs to become a new Rainbow Scrap Challenge block going forward.  But I also wanted to do the math to use 5" squares - because I have a lot - instead of 6".   Sometimes quilt math can be tricky but this one was easy.  The original pattern used 6" and 3" squares, so it was easy to see that half of 5" will be 2.5".  Here is the first one of these Whirl blocks.

Another priority project this week is a Sunflower wall hanging (Lori Holt).  I have one sunflower block done and the other 3 are partially done.  Next up is making those green leaf sections.  I haven't decided yet whether to use scrappy blue blocks for that center and border, but I'm leaning toward making those areas totally scrappy.  There's no rush on this one. 

And now that we have this month's row pattern for Saturday Sampler I will be doing some cutting for that project.   

I'm linking up today with:

https://smallquiltsanddollquilts.blogspot.com/ 

https://songbirddesigns.blog  

RSC25 - Week #19

Only 3 of these 5" string triangle blocks have been made this week.  I need to organize the green scrap bin a lot more before making more of these as I like to use the smaller scraps.  

I also made 3 of the Hollow 9-Patch blocks.  I haven't counted yet, but I'm sure there are slightly more than 20 of them so far.   

One fun sew-along I participate in each year is the Riley Blake Design (RBD) challenge.  The blocks are usually 10" square, and there are 16 different ones so you end up with a sampler.  One year I did my blocks in blue and white.  In 2024 I used 30s reproduction fabrics and also added extra blocks from previous RBD years to make it bigger.  This year I decided it was time to dig into the Tula Pink fabrics I've been hoarding for a few years.  This week's block is really easy and fast to make - and I chose GREEN. My brain is now telling me this would be a great RSC block in the future because it is easy and quite striking.  I may try to do the math to use 5" squares instead of 6" squares, because I have a LOT of the 5" ones.

I have to show off the other scrappy project that I finished this week, even though it isn't green.  This is a 3-dimensional Moravian Star.  There are 12 stars with 5 points each - all hand stitched.  This is English paper piecing basically, but the cardboard is left in to provide structure for the star.  The sides of each diamond shape is 1.5".  I glued an iridescent bead into the center of each of the individual stars.

Check out more Rainbow Scrap Challenge fun at . . .

https://superscrappy.blogspot.com

Riley Blake challenge #14

 We're nearly to the end of the 2025 Riley Blake challenge, with only 2 more blocks to be released before the final layout.

Give It a Whirl was designed by Melissa Mortenson. This was a really fast block to make, as the whole process took less than an hour.  Each block finishes at 10" square.  I'm using all Tula Pink fabrics for this sew-along.  

Moravian Star

I finished the blue Moravian Star this week.  This is completely hand stitched with the diamond shapes done in the English paper piecing technique.  But in this case the paper is actually light weight cardboard and it's left in permanently.  Back in December we got a little kit at Sew Vintage with all the cardboard diamonds cut, along with a little snipping tool, and a glue stick.  I decided to use lots of different shades of blue and aqua scraps for mine.

Several years ago - maybe almost 20 - I attended a workshop to learn how to make these. It was really fun. That first Moravian Star is done in Christmas colors from a charm pack I had.  There is a bell glued into each star center - mostly to hide less than perfect points matching in those star centers.  This time I glued iridescent beads into the star centers.  The blue one is slightly smaller than the Christmas one. 

It all depends on the size of the diamonds used to make the stars.  The blue one has 1.5" sides on the diamonds.  The Christmas one has 2" sides.  There are 12 stars, with 5 diamonds each.  It could be fun to make a really big version - some day.