October goals update

My October goal was pretty light and in hind sight, for good reason! Life just doesn't seem to slow down. My goal was to decide on and start the quilting on my 15 minutes of play blocks quilt. 

Unfortunately, I didn't make the bonus of finishing. 

I did decide on the quilting for my 15 minutes of play orphaned blocks quilt. In the 'made' fabric squares I decided to quilt each on with a matching thread color. I made a twisting log cabin pattern in each. There are 20 different squares so I had 20 different thread color changes. I also decided (about half way through) to stitch in the ditch around each star point in the color of the point. 

There is a lot of negative space in this quilt so I needed to decide what to do. In looking at the whole quilt, I decided to go back and quilt echoing squares around the 'made' fabric squares in the color of the square. Yes, it would have been more efficient to have decided to do this while I had the specific colors threaded but I don't always do things the easy way. 

I am currently working on going back to changing threads 20 times to finish this part of the quilting. 20 thread changes adds a bit of time to the quilting process!

I have a few of them done and I do have a plan for the remaining negative space with white thread! Inside the stars, I am planning a swirl or concentric circles and in the space between the stars, straight line quilting in a chevron pattern. IT"S GETTING THERE!

I did keep up with my RSC blocks and Milky Way QAL blocks and I'm only one block behind on Grandma's Kitchen. 

Also my charity quilt is almost a flimsy! 

I linking up to October Finish Link Up over at Elm Street Quilts. 

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Falling Behind

It is Fall and I find myself falling behind in my quilt alongs and challenges. School has been busy, we took our annual trip up to Door County, and the Chicago Cubs are in the playoffs. All these have contributed to minimal sewing time.  Yesterday I took a day off from school thinking I would have time to catch up but I found that I really needed to get some household duties done first. This  only gave me a couple of hours in my sewing room. 

I was able to complete my pink little spools yesterday 

and this morning I worked on my Milky Way QAL star called Sol. The QAL is sponsored by Blossom Heart Quilts.

These challenges/QAL will soon come to an end. Here are all the little spools together. All arranged neatly in rows with the purple and reds spools stacked. How do you arrange your threads in your sewing room?

Here are all the stars so far in the Milky Way quilt.

Now to get caught up on my Grandma's Kitchen Sew Along blocks and my October goal for OMG. 

I am linking to So Scrappy Saturday Parade of Pink.

October Goals

It is time to set some October goals! Since I finished my Sail Away! quilt, I can now refocus on my quilt using the orphaned 15 min of play blocks that I had finished the flimsy as part of my August goals. 

On Saturday (still officially September) this happened!

I found some time to sandwich this quilt and it is now ready to quilt! I'm not sure how to quilt it yet...should I match the thread colors to the blocks, use a variegated thread, or a neutral? What do I do in all the negative space? 

Decisions to be made! Ideas? 

My goal for October will be to make a final decision on the quilting and get it started. Bonus would be to finish!

I also have been working on a charity 2 color quilt. It is a basic bear claw block with lots of HST pieces. I found this technique that makes 18 2" finished HST and it really speeded up the process. 

Have you ever used this technique? It was new to me!

The papers did not come big enough for the large HST piece so I did these using a traditional technique.

October brings a new color for the Rainbow Scrap challenge and a new star for the Milky Way QAL. This month's color is pink and the star is called Sol. 

I am also keeping up fairly well with the Grandma's Kitchen weekly Sew Along. 

Here is last weeks block.

I'm linking up to One Monthly Goal October Link-up over at Elm Creek Quilts.

We are heading up North mid~week to experience the trees showing all their glorious Fall colors! It is such a beautiful time! Hope we have great weather!