A little bit of this and that

 I'm not quite ready to share my almost finished secret project (a birthday gift for my SIL)! I am hand stitching the binding and then need to label and gift it! Soon!

But since July rolled around (how can this year be going so fast?), there is a new color of the month for the RSC, dark blue, and a new block for Covered in Love charity (stars).

I cut and sewed 10 wonky shoo fly blocks and 10 joy luck blocks in dark blues. 

wonky shoo fly

Joy Luck

I also cut many dark blue and purple scraps for my tumbler blocks.

(I never got around to cutting purple scraps in June) 

Now to hand stitch them! 

Linking to Scrap Happy Saturday @So Scrappy.

Here are my star blocks for the Covered in Love charity. 

Kat @Kat & Cat Quilts is back to hosting this round after taking 2 months off to catch up. May/June was hosted by Tammy @Travelin' Sew I. 

July/August is typically star blocks, a favorite! There are so many to choose from!

Linking to Midweek Makers @Quiltfabrication, Stitch and Show @Life in the Scrapatch, and Monday Making @Love, Laugh Quilt

 

July also means a new calendar and the finished calendar for the month of June! 

June is a birthday month in our family including mine! 

July is the start of the Macaron Mystery Quilt hosted by Cheryl @MeadowMistDesigns. This month is all about fabric requirements and picks!

Here are my choices.

Mostly from my stash but I needed to add the light polka dot fabric and get a bit more of the Kona cactus and Kona white. 

This is my 3rd mystery QAL with Cheryl! It is a nice, easy pace and Cheryl's designs are great! Will you be joining? 

At my knitting club (we meet on Monday nights), one friend asked if anyone heard of a knitted potholder that was a folded type (her niece wanted to know and sent some pictures). So in usual fashion, we all start a google search to see what we could find. It turns out that the only method we could find was crochet. 

So on Tuesday night after I finished knitting my project, I started to crochet one that I found on YouTube. It is a pretty interesting technique that intrigued me.

It is double thick and made from cotton yarn. It was actually pretty fun to watch come together and fairly easy so I offered to teach it at knitting this past Monday!

Hope to be back soon with my secret finish!   

Still at it...

paper piecing that is....I needed a few more Red White and Blue stars so I kept making more. And now I'm officially done with paper piecing stars...at least for a while. Here are my new ones...

All of the blocks above are from one of these Carol Doak's books: 50 Fabulous Paper Pieced Stars or 40 Bright & Bold Paper Pieced Blocks 

And finally, this 5-pointed star block. It was one that was part of the Celebrate Red White and Blue Blog Hop from Ellen over at Hot Pink Peonies. I had a bit of trouble getting the middle to lay flat...lots of seams coming together at unusual angles...but in the end, after some unstitching and restitching...it came together. I'm pleased with it!

So now there are 16 different paper~pieced stars!

To give them some personal space, I added a 1" sashing around the blocks using one of the blues from a couple of the blocks. Julie from Jaybird Quilts talks about quilts without borders in her book Skip the Borders...Sew...No borders...just sandwich, quilt and bind! Almost finished!

Pictures from Norway will be coming soon...it is taking a while to process the hundreds of photos

Take a moment...

Today I found myself with a day off from work. I had plans to work on several projects, play around with some designing, and do some hand sewing of the binding I sewed on yesterday.  

Oh did I have plans...but as I was reading Madame Samm's post over at Sew I Quilt this morning [while enjoying my morning coffee], I was deeply touched by this story over at The Scrappy Appleyard. This grieving family is in need of some star blocks.  I immediately knew that I would help. 

I decided to lay all my plans aside, at least temporarily, to work on a few stars.  I dug through my muted red, white and blue fabrics and found some that would work and I did a quick search for stars patterns. It really didn't take much time to cut out and stitch these blocks together.  

The blocks could be 8 1/2" or 12 1/2" unfinished. 

Before the morning was finished they were completed and off to the post office I went. If your willing to help, please go over and read about Tory's story. I'm sure you will be as touched as I was.