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A is for Abacus.
Abacus is a bonus quilt made from leftover triangles while making the RSC blocks this year. I made a total of 30 Sister's Choice blocks, resulting in 60 bonus blocks. In the pictures below you can see how the herd grew.
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| In the beginning |
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| Red ones |
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| Purple Ones |
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| It grows! |
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| Almost there |
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| Finished Flimsy |
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| Baste, shall we? |
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| Finished!!! |
Right: a monarch and a bee with compass plant.
Sawtooth sunflower, tall boneset, goldenrod. Jewelweed, false aster, Drummond's aster. Panicled aster, grass-leaf goldenrod, purplestem aster.
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I have named him Varun, after the Hindu deity of sea and sky and rain. By now Varun has traveled the width of the country and reached Bernie on the west coast.
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| Varun - 60" by 80" |
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| Varun - Green Backing |
Each plus block finished at 10" square. 48 blocks were arranged 6 by 8 for a finished quilt measuring 60" by 80". Varun is my contribution to the Positivity QAL and is a Mercyful Quilt.
Wrapped with Kindness (may need tissues)
Here are the pictures showing the progression ...
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Barn Quilts was the topic at the Zoom quilt guild meeting on Wednesday. Suzi Parron has traveled across the country to document these bold outdoor art installations. She says there are at least 16,000 barn quilts and the list keeps growing.
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I made a significant design change on the wedding quilt that required three evenings with the seam ripper. I'll show you the details in the Weekly Update next Monday.
To keep my spirits from flagging I took a break and made and finished a quick project. Here are the 16 ...
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Happy Independence Day! I hope you and your family celebrated as much or as little as you pleased. (We stayed indoors in the air conditioning.)
Dark blue is the July color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.
This year I am making 16 framed four-patch blocks each month. They're 5.5" unfinished.
I'm also participating in Joy's Table Scraps Challenge with two potholders in the monthly color.
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The Purple blocks for June RSC 2021 are complete. YIPPEE!!! Here they are:
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| Reddish Purple |
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| Bluish Purple |
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| True-ish Purple |
Since I had purple on my mind, I saw purple everywhere and lots of it. Here are a few glimpses.
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| Hydrangeas |
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| Allium something - Ornamental Onion |
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| Purple and Hairy Leaves!!! |
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| I saw a Purple Wall!!! |
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| In Berlin, MD |
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| Noticed this sign on vacation in Berlin, MD |
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| A purple butterfly!!! |
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| Pansies :-) |
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| O Beautiful - Don't know thy name |
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| One purple shell on the pathway to The Inn Berlin |
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| Do you like Dark? |
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| Or Light |
Here are the secondary blocks, using the triangle leftovers ...
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The stash report for May:
Fabric IN: 19-1/2 yards, $57 Fabric OUT: 34-3/4 Fabric IN YTD: 99-5/8, $158.50 (average $1.59/yd) Fabric OUT YTD: 217-3/8 Net reduction: 117-3/4
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The best flowers are at the Keukenhof in Amsterdam. A bit out of my reach, mostly.
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| Tulips in Amsterdam, 2019 |
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| Keukenhof Gardens |
The Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania are huge and absolutely beautiful, but still a few hours from me.
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| Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania |
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| Water Lilies |
The Cherry Blossoms in Washington DC are more accessible and I don't mind the long train ride although I will avoid the nightmarish parking in downtown DC.
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| From 2008. My first time :-) |
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| So beautiful |
The Positivity Quilt-Along (QAL) begins on Sunday, May 30, 2021.
While you wrap up your current projects, clean the bobbins, pick up the stray pins and change the blade in your rotary cutters, I am busy writing the tutorial and debating (sometimes silently) layout options.
Here are the gifts/prizes we have gleefully secured for the Positivity QAL. Kudos to the sponsors!!!
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| egret at Sedge Meadow Savanna |
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| Happy Easter! |
The arch in this fallen oak (Rollins Savanna) looked like a portal. I didn't want to take any chances of what might happen if I went through it.
We saw a pair of cranes at Illinois Beach State ...
On Saturday evening we went to the first indoor concert in exactly a year. (The last time was March 7, 2020.) Only 50 people were in attendance with ample social distancing. The Lake County Symphony Orchestra featured a percussionist (marimba and vibraphone) and a brass quintet.
Spring is in the air with lots of sunshine and mild temperatures. . It was great ...
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| Greens on the Color Wheel |
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| (c) Jen Kingwell |
In 2019 I made 360 pinwheels for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. They've been in a box waiting for the right opportunity to become a quilt.
That opportunity came when I read Jen Kingwell's book Quilt Lovely, I bought a copy after attending the virtual program she gave for NSQG last month, The strong vertical columns on neutral really appealed to me. Note that hers has three different kinds of pinwheels.
For Joy's Table Scraps challenge: I made two pink potholders.
I also made some framed four-patch blocks. (5.5" unfinished)
Years ago I read a time management book that likened the results of procrastination to an obstacle that gets bigger around as the procrastination continues - so big that it takes more effort to go around it than it would be to just go over it. That's how I've been with a non-quilting project this week that involved report-writing and statistics-compiling. I have to check to see that all ...
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Wednesday my husband and I went out to discover a new-to-us segment of the lakefront bike trail. It was so calm -- in great contrast to the upheaval in Washington, D.C. which we watched on the news, horrified.
(You can tell it's a different day by the color of my turtleneck. :) )
Our first forest preserve outings of the year -- Spring Bluff on Saturday and Van Patten Woods on Sunday.
Enough people had walked along the trails to pack down the snow so I didn't flounder.
Left collage: red-wing blackbird nest, a gravity defying limb, horsetails.
Right collage: gull tracks in the sand.
