Sage and forest green

After some busy knitting I decided to take the Rainbow Scrap Challenge for this month. The colours are sage and forest green, most pleasing colours for men's plaid shirts. My special stash is full of men's shirts, washed, cut apart and ironed, sorted by colour and waiting for inspiring projects. My RSC block is a simple 9-patch with white. The idea of forest green is luckily a very wide range of green shades, from pine and fir and juniper to early Spring or Summer leaves of birch, aspen, willow and alder, moss greens and all kinds of forest flowers. This is my selection:

Normally I would have chosen only plaids, but the solid green at the center was too nice to be left out.

I have not yet decided how to set the blocks. If I'm going to make several new blocks each month I may have enough blocks to make two new quilts at the end of the year.

The new plaid quilt

Here it is, my new plaid quilt.

It is a mixture of very different shirts which have come to the end of their career in the clothing business or, in one case, never even made it so far but spent some 50 years or probably more as a UFO, cut parts carefully folded with some of the paper patterns pinned to the smallest parts. It could have been meant for me, the pale yellow and grey. A blouse with short sleeves for a girl of maybe 9-10 years of age. Some of this fabric is still left for smaller blocks in another quilt. The obviously female fabrics were my mother's blouses, too small for me to wear so I finally decided to give them a new life. The rest of the plaids are from my usual stash of old men's old shirts. As the previous quilt top only had blue shirts mixed with solid white, here I used all other colours but blue.
It is always fun to plan a new quilt and watch it grow from piles of squares to piles of blocks, then rows and finally a quilt top. The next step is less fun but vital, building the quilt sandwich and pinning or basting it. I have hand quilted only one large quilt in my life, the Grandmother's Garden quilt for my daughter Kaija, and some preemie quilts. I can manage machine quilting on my sewing machine if the quilt is not too big. Maybe I need to start considering these next steps, because this top is already the fourth waiting to be quilted!

Liverworts, Anemone Hepatica, have opened their flowers. I moved these to our garden from "back home" on my last visit there.

Pin codes or code pins

 Have you ever joined your quilt blocks upside down, left instead of right or to the wrong end of the row? I have. To avoid this I have used pieces of masking tape with row numbers and block ABC written on them. Lesson: if the quilt is a slowly progressing UFO, there will be glue remains and permanent stains. I have used little pieces of paper with row ABC and block numbers pinned on the blocks, and kept the countless used papers in a tiny box. Lesson: it is very hard to find the numbers or letters needed for a second project. Then I started using one pin for the first row, two for the second etc. Lesson: I run out of pins when I had very many rows to mark.

Yesterday I was piecing 9-patches for the Shadow Plaid quilt and had an excellent idea. I just had the three rows to sew, so I marked the top left HST with a blue pin, the beginning of the next row with a red one, and the bottom row with a white pin. I always think of these colours as blue-red-white, no other order, so it was easy to remember which row was which.

I wanted to make all four 9-patches for a block at a time, so I pinned the finished rows together with an extra pin (no colour code here ;o)).

This way it was easy to keep each set separate for ironing. When the 9-patches were sewn after ironing, I marked the top left corner with a pin again, because it matters that they stay the way I planned.

I don't want the same fabrics side by side in two blocks, and in a scrappy quilt like this I don't have my fabrics representing those of the pattern. I just make my own combinations. When a whole block is ready, I have removed all the other pins but use again one pin to mark the top left corner. I think I will use the blue-red-white system here too for the first row of three blocks, or, because I will have 12 blocks at the end, I could use any colour in the alphabetical order of their names.

This quilt has had such a slow start but now I'm at the stage I love most, and the little scraps of old shirts stored in a box are finally coming together to blocks that look like something with a plan.

How do you keep your blocks organized?

 Some projects don't want to play with me nicely. This is one of them. I was excited to start it quite a long time ago, one Winter.

I had not much experience with HSTs at the time, so I cut my fabrics exactly like the pattern said. My seam allowances weren't as scant as they ought to have been. Arrgh! Better store such a project away for a long while. Now I have unpicked some seams, cut down several hopelessly too small squares for a smaller project, and cut lots of new more generous squares. I have drawn diagonal lines, sewn diagonal seams and cut 146 medium/dark HSTs and so far 116 dark/light HSTs.

Still a lot of sewing and cutting and trimming to do before I get to the fun part, arranging the squares to blocks.

This year we have had to wait for warm (over 20C/68F) days longer than in 50 years. In Järvenpää, the same organizers as before have planted flowers to cheer up the streets, especially this ugly fence around a parking lot.

In 2013 they used boots and in 2014 handbags as planters. The florist shop sells a special bouquet of flowers all year, and for each sold bouquet they donate one plant for this project. They have donated 1,000 plants again this year!

I really like this year's idea with bicycles that have reached the end of their cycling life, painted all in different shades, with all kinds of baskets and 

even an old barbeque on top of a painted suitcase or a metal bucket look fun.

Another Aviatrix baby hat for a friend to give to the future granddaughter (?) of  her sister. I really like this pattern and I hope it will suit the baby. The flowers can be removed if the baby is a boy.

This is the first year that our rhododendron is in full bloom, at least this one. Maybe it likes this 12C/56F temperature and the strong winds!

Freezing

This winter feels like there is no end to it. It started early, we had the first snow in mid October, and the snow that stayed came around the 15th of November. Three months ago. It has snowed over 60 cm or 25" ( a quilting ruler would be snowed in) in all, and there will be more snow before any sign of spring.

A sunrise last week:

Our little friends have eaten almost 50 kg sunflower seeds and peanuts this winter. Here on the left a Mrs. Bullfinch and on the right Mr. Gray Linnet. He is a newcomer, they don't usually stay up here for winter.

This morning the temperature was really low, -23 C or -9 F, but (or beause of that) the day has been sunny. Mr. Bullfinch enjoys the sun here.

It has been so cold that I have just been knitting socks by the fireplace and not freezing by the sewing machine. All I finished this week there was these two pillowcases for Jackie's summer camp project.

This left me with some colourful strips so I can make a couple of QAYG blocks for the OZ Comfort Quilts - click the button on my right sidebar.

The ninepatch backing gives me a headache so I decided to let it rest until my head is clearer. I started - finally - a plaid shirt project from this book in class:

but the sewing was so wonky that I think I have an unpicking project for the evenings before I can continue. I hope you have had a more successful week!

Stars and Squares

This is what I have been doing with my granny squares while watching TV in the evenings:

I have added one or two rounds in cream coloured wool so they are all about the same size. I have more than 10 squares waiting for the extra rounds, and I will be making new squares as well.

I have also been sewing a little, adding to this pile of my 6" Maverick Star blocks.

You may remember the Shadow Plaid quilt pattern I wanted to make? I started cutting squares for it so I could use the leftover scraps from those shirts for the Maverick stars. Time for the Shadow Plaid is maybe in the autumn. I need dark, medium and light plaids, hundreds of squares for the triangles. It is going to be so much fun.

These are some of the newest stars I made.



You may also remember that I made a star quilt top for the Bushfire Quilt Project earlier this year. Last weekend Tia organized a quilting bee to finish quilts from the blocks and tops she was sent from all over the world. You can read here about it. My top must have been among the most exotic ones, because she gave it so much publicity.

We are having a long weekend now, but I hope to get something sewn as well.

Trying to get started again

Last week we had frosty days like this, a beautiful sunset at 4 p.m. in Järvenpää, the sun setting behind the lake:

Since then the weather has been cloudy and dull and too warm, and all our snow has melted away. The days have been too dark to make any photos, and my energy has been hiding so there is not much sewing to report either.

This morning I took my big scissors and started cutting some plaid shirts I had bought from a charity shop. Our living room floor looks like this when I work there:

I took all these bits in the bin after taking this photo and swept the floor clean. The cutting is a first step of a new quilt I'm planning to make from the Mad about Plaid book I have shown earlier. I still need to go through all my plastic bags, and organized stash, and unorganized stash, and Mr. Kotkarankki's clothes (the worn-out ones!) to find all the necessary dark, medium and light plaids needed for the quilt. And maybe visit another charity shop for more shades. Then there will be a lot of cutting to do. And really many buttons! I may have to think where I could use all the buttons I cut from the shirts; there are usually 10-12 normal size buttons and often 2-5 tiny ones, if there are buttons on the collars and the cuffs.

Soon I will also be starting a tea related project for the Time for Tea Swap hosted by Stephanie, but that will be a secret project because the swap is secret, too. The swap is by invitation only, but there are some great links to free patterns for anyone, if you want to sew or knit something tea related for yourself.