quiltingbydawn: Watermelon Sparkler

Saturday, February 6, 2021

A New Month and a New Finish!

This week began a new month and that means a new color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge (RSC)! Angela choose sunny yellow! Before I get to my yellow blocks I want to share a new finish!

Way back in September, I joined a quilt challenge hosted by the National Quilter's Circle called Starlight Mountains. In October, I finished the flimsy but then it was put aside to wait it's turn for further attention. In mid-January I was able to put the backing together and get it sandwiched. I started quilting the last days of January and finally have a finish!

I'm naming this quilt Watermelon Sparkler. All the fabrics are from my stash - most were donated to me years ago.

The exception is the Kona black and white that are regular staples in my fabric stash.

I think this quilt will make a nice picnic quilt with all the watermelons slices!

The quilting in the main part of the quilt is straight line along the length of the quilt. In the outside border I quilted a star and banner motif.

You can see it better in the picture below.

This quilt finishes at 61" x 77.5"

I was excited to pull out my yellow scrap bin and dive into making my blocks for the RSC. I am working on 2 different blocks each month as well as cutting scraps for my EPP tumbler blocks.

First, I worked on making the wonky shoo fly blocks. This is a fun block and it gives a great opportunity to use the smallest scraps!

I made 10 of these. The background fabrics are low volume cream to beige scraps.

I then settled in to make the Joy Luck blocks. The background for these are black on white scraps or white on white scraps.

I also cut at least 10 pieces for my EPP tumblers but those still need to be

hand stitched.

This week was Round #3 for the SAHRR. Round #3 is hosted by Anja @AnjaQuilts. She choose flying geese for the 3rd round. Anja did some paper piecing for her flying geese so she could vary the size of the geese. This was effective for her as she is using all solids. Others did just around the corners, another did wonky geese, or double geese or even geese made into stars. Most chose to stack their geese. I chose to lay my geese side by side. Here is mine. Go to the link above to see what others have done.

I'm ready for Round #4

Inspired by my blogger friend, Annie @FreezeFrame03, I once again began a monthly calendar journal. I kept one before in 2013 and 2014. At that time I was making my monthly calendars from fabric with each month having a different theme. I used stamps and other supplies to record one thing each day. You can see some pages here and here and here. I really enjoyed making them but as you can imagine, they were time consuming. When my mom got sick, I couldn't keep up and I never got back into it. After admiring that Annie was still journaling, I asked her what calendar she used. She was actually trying to find a way to simplify making the journal and she shared a link for a downloadable calendar. Now, my creativity nor handwriting skills are not even close to Annie's. However, I did start a simpler calendar journal and that makes me happy!