Using more scraps

I'll have to admit I'm not too crazy about the quilt I shared in my last post.  But please don't say "me either" because I'm a little touchy right now.  It seems like that often happens with quilts that I start and then put aside for any length of time.  I have to get better about finishing a project that I start -- or just get rid of it if I don't want to finish it while I'm still excited about it.

Anyway -- I needed something to cheer me up.  I had cut tons of 2-1/2" strips for the 36-patch quilt, and I had lots of end pieces left after I diced them up.  I thought I should be able to put them together into  something that would please me, so I made another baby quilt top.

I just love a scrappy look.  My design board still holds the 36-patch quilt, so I tried the clothesline.  It doesn't really show the colors too well.

Here's one indoors.

I love it -- it almost makes me want to have another baby to wrap it around.  Even the purple polka dots don't bother me.  Now I really really have to get busy and quilt a few of my tops.  Really.  That'll be my August goal.

June UFO Progress

There hasn't been too much time this month for a quilting project -- and it looks like July will be just as busy.

But - I have managed to find a few hours here and there to make some progress on my "Ice Cream Quilt"

It's all basted -- with a wonderful soft wool batting that's a dream to quilt.  I wanted to play around with the quilting on this one.  I thought I'd do some machine quilting and some hand quilting, using different colors and different threads, some perl cotton and some embroidery floss. 

The hand work has turned out to be much more fun than the machine quilting, so I don't think I'll be adding too many more machine quilted lines.  The closer I get to the outer edges, the bigger the chance is that I may change my mind on that.  We'll see. 

I didn't set a goal to finish this one in June -- only to get it basted and start the quilting.  I feel like I've met that goal and anything else that gets done on it in June is a bonus. 

The big news is that I've gone 37 days without buying any fabric.  Amazing!  I have had to empty a few online shopping carts during that time.

March UFO Challenge

Judy over at Patchwork Times picked #1 on our lists to finish for March. My #1 challenge was a quilt from Kaffe Fassett's Quilt Romance called Ice Cream Quilt. I had a pretty easy challenge for this one -- I wanted to get the top completed and I did.

It was more difficult to get a picture of it. Although today was a sunny day, it was way too windy to try to photograph an unquilted quilt top outside. I finally pinned it to my living room curtains. With the sun shining through from the back, it was still hard to get the colors.



I had fun playing with fabrics with this one. But many times I wished I lived close to a quilt shop that carried Kaffe fabrics. I order a lot of my fabric online, but once in awhile a color isn't what you expect it to be.



I didn't have the backing or the batting I needed to go any further on the Ice Cream Quilt quilt, so I moved it down to #8 and finished this one to make room for it.




It almost looks like a good match for that house on the street behind me!

I think I'll play with some smaller quilts while I wait to see what the April challenge will be.