Orange is a small color for most people in a long month of Saturdays. Next month is going to be a catch up month of sorts with the color being "pastel". Find all the extra light blues, light pinks, light greens. Now is the time to sort them out and use them to round out your collections. The usual colors will return next month, but for now, lets focus on those scraps that can get left behind in a rainbow hued collection. Some blocks need to be able to recede so that others can shine. In the end, that contrast will help your quilt to have a greater dimension and depth.
Tomorrow is still part of the orange month though, so take some time to polish those off if you need to. I got a few leaders and enders put together, but a couple of hours this morning should be enough to round out the collection. Everything is sitting next to the machine and ready to sew.I also pulled out a couple of flimsies to get them ready to move on the next phase. The blossom block turned into a square top which has always bothered me. So I am working on adding top and bottom borders and maybe some Dresden Plate flowers to make things more rectangular.
There is also the Hen and Chicks top which was the quilt along from 2024. I have decided to hand quilt this one. It is all basted now and ready to take to Virginia next week.
Finally, I made a quick baby quilt for a friend at work who has been having a hard time. Lots of a hard time actually. The baby isn't quite out of the NICU yet, or even back in the state, but hopefully that will happen soon and we will have a shower for him. I cut out the binding yesterday while a friend was over making a t-shirt quilt. I keep pulling out the monochromatic 16 patch blocks and using them for all sorts of things. I was going to make a Sweet Irene quilt with them. It is good to see them getting used up. Leaders and enders can get out of hand if you aren't careful.
Deanna is the biology teacher who took over my AP classes when I left the classroom to work as the College Coach. We got supplies to make t-shirt quilts as part of the new makerspace at school. I've been working with teachers to practice while we wait for everything to be ready enough for the kids to make quilts. Most of the teachers come in and make a couple of blocks and then get busy and move on to other things. We had a couple of small finished flimsies, but no quilts so far. Deanna came in with all the shirts that she has been saving for her son for the last decade plus and decided she was ready to do this. So she worked during the last couple of weeks of school to get the blocks ready, then watched some Youtube videos about how to put them together. We have a couple of donated sewing machines now, so she put the top together in two big chunks. Then she came over for the last two days and we quilted it up to make this quilt! It is huge! And heavy. And full of so many memories, just the way that t-shirt quilts are supposed to be. She wanted to have it ready to put on his bed when he gets back from a summer college trip next week.
In other life updates, Sydney has found an apartment! We will help her move in the week after the 4th of July. I submitted a new draft of my literature review for my dissertation yesterday, and there are three more weeks left in this term for my other two classes. Then there is a nice long break and I am so looking forward to chopping wood, painting and helping Kurt with the master bathroom remodel and new windows in Virginia. His dad is coming up for the 4th of July and is bringing a new friend.
It is a good thing that I chose a small color for May! I did it quite deliberately, knowing that both a wedding and graduation would take up a bit of time. If only there were a few inches of empty space in my sewing room I would be wildly creating fabric beauty.
Yesterday was the last day of school! So now there is time. But Sydney has invaded my sewing room, the guest room. Finding a clutter free area of the house has become tricky. We celebrated her birthday on Tuesday. It was Monday, but we never saw her on that day. It is a bit chaotic when the recent college graduate is home for a gap month before starting a new job apparently. All the love in the world! We are happy to see her from time to time while we host her makeup and clothes. She has been catching up with the boyfriend from Iowa who goes to college here at FIT. She is doing a girls weekend with high school friends who are now done with college and back for the summer. She is loving every minute of it and we are so happy to have her her (along with her wardrobe of course).
Mr. Linky was being difficult. I think it is working now. This might be my motivation to move to InLinkz which is prettier anyway.
It has been a lot for a very long time. Now I am looking forward to doing very little for a a while.
The wedding was beautiful. It took place outside at a sailing squadron in Sarasota. Anna and Jordan are both big sailors, and so there were many sailing themed decorations.
Sydney brought her new boyfriend. Which was a big deal, because no casual plus ones were allowed. So that makes him a non-casual boyfriend. She is here with us until she starts her new job at the end of July. Between now and then she just needs to get an apartment in Bocca and move out of her apartment in Gainesville.
I didn't get many photos, and the official ones are not back from the photographer yet, She won't send out unedited proofs and so that will take a bit of time. There was a sunset, which felt strange, because we see the sunrise on the east coast. Sunsets are pretty too.
At the end of the evening, the groomsmen threw Jordan into the bay and Anna followed. She was not planning to save her wedding dress, and so it was fine that they all got a little wet.
How has your month been so far? I do plan to dig into some orange scraps today. Mindless sewing is just what I need right now. I do have plans for the baby quilt though. It is going to be wonky and free form sailboats and nautical flags that spell out the baby's name. It is going to be James by the way, we found out at the wedding that it will be a boy. They hid the name in nautical flags on the seating chart for the wedding.
If all goes well, this post will appear as scheduled on Saturday morning when we are just getting ready for the wedding. That will be the second of our big events this week!
I am celebrating the month of May with the orange of the Florida gators!
May is all about orange! I chose this because it is usually a small color, and May is an unusually large month. I do have some string blocks to share, not because I made them this month, but because I sewed a bunch of strings at the cabin last summer. Anna is home for the next week! We will all go to Sydney's graduation on Monday and then hang out until it is time to go to the wedding next weekend. I will be at school two days this week. It would have been great to take the entire week, but AP testing starts on Monday and It would be rude to just disappear and leave everyone else to do the work. For today, I need to polish off my graduate school work for the week and see if Anna wants to do anything festive before the wedding. Maybe a mani-pedi? How do your orange scraps look? It is a festive color, even if it can seem a bit aggressive.
How has another month rushed by? There wasn't much time to sew this week, but I caught up with a few things from the ironing basket and the sorting piles to come up with some more blocks to add to the wall.
There were some beautiful sunrises this week.
Also a lot of end of year rushing at work, which made it nice to take a deep breath and find a minute every morning to just take it all in.
My main goal for this morning it to get the log cabin blocks done and off of the frame. Anna will be here on Friday to stay with us until the wedding and it would be nice if she had a place to sleep. I got to the end of the batting that I had cut from the roll. I think that was 90 inches and the quilt is 110 inches. So maybe 20 more inches to quilt? I will have to cut piece of batting to move on. I was sure that I could puzzle together some frankenbatting, but I seem to be pretty low on leftovers right now. Honestly, being pretty low on leftovers is a good thing. It means that I am using things up efficiently. Its been over a decade of using up things and it suddenly seems to be making a dent!
Mister linky is below, please share your pink progress for this month. May starts on Friday and it is going to be orange! I made sure to choose a small color because it is going to be a crazy month. End of the year festivities and AP testing at work, graduation for Sydney, Wedding for Anna. Deep breath for me? Time will tell!
I haven't make much more progress on pink. There are always a couple of leader and ender blocks to add to the wall as I sew other things. Most of my sewing time has been taken up with the log cabin quilt.
We had Friday off of school for Easter weekend. We don't always get religious holidays, but they gave it to us this year. It is the last long weekend until Memorial day at the end of May, so I am trying to enjoy it. Thursday, also known as fake Friday, was trivia. We won! It always comes down to the last question, we didn't know it and bet zero.
Yesterday I brought up the fabric basket where I dump all the leftover fabric for later. I sorted and cut and put things away. It felt good to start fresh again.
Then I celebrated by sewing some pink. Look how happy those blocks look? Such a softer and less angry version of red. Have you started on pink yet?
I ran out of red leaders and enders while I was sewing the log cabin blocks, but there is a good representation of red on the wall. Time to go and figure out what color is next! (Just checked, and pink is up next!)
It has been a lovely week. Spring break is one of the nice things about teaching. How has your red month progressed?
So maybe red isn't the color that comes to mind when you think about relaxation, but it is a great color for spring break. Kurt and I are (hopefully) off to Jamaica for the trip that was supposed to have happened over Veteran's day when they had that massive hurricane. So far our flight has been delayed 45 minutes due to the TSA issues, but we are patient and hopeful.
While putting together the log cabin blocks, I worked a few more red blocks in as leaders and enders. Finding contrasting shades of red for the centers of the dot blocks was not easy, so I went with some alternate colors instead. I don't have nearly as many reds as blues or greens, so there won't be too many more for next week which is the last red Saturday. How are your blocks coming along this month? Misterlinky is below. Please share with us all. This is scheduled for bright and early on Saturday, hopefully it all works as it should because I will be on a beach with an adult beverage and a trashy romance novel.
How are your reds coming along.
I sewed - on a Thursday! Yesterday was a teacher workday which meant that Thursday felt like a Friday and so I sewed. Crumb strips are so relaxing to make. No measuring, very little cutting. Then I went out and got a massage. Apparently I have a lot of tension in my back. No surprise there. Things have settled down at work though and spring break is right around the corner. My goal for today is to finish up the rest of my graduate school work for this week so that I can slide into the break with no stress. The first chapter of my dissertation was officially accepted! It is actually chapter 3, but it is the first one that I have written. I learned last weekend that all of the necessary people were not part of my Canvas classroom to give approval to my submission, but I got that all straightened out and that means one class is off of my to-do list. I have a haircut first thing this morning and then I will power through the rest. How are your reds coming along? I know that people do red and white quilts, but red is so strong - I think it looks better with other blocks.
Are you ready with your reds? I found a few blocks ready to come out and play, but my sewing machine was at school this week as we worked on t-shirt quilts using some of our new makerspace equipment.
I made the ugliest quit top imaginable from a box of shirts that had been moving from place to place for many years. There are shirts here from 3 junior high schools and two high schools that I attended along with random other shirts from so many years ago. Mostly I was helping other people to press and trim their shirts. We did a trial run with teachers and then will have another workshop with seniors in a couple of weeks so that they can start their own t-shirt quilts.
On the work front, my principal has promised me at least a 60% job next year! I was glad to be able to move ahead with planning for my summer boot camp and even ordered a planner for next school year as we began to plan summer workshops and professional development sessions. After waiting for two and a half months to find out whether I would be unemployed, it is a relief to know that I will have a job and be able to finish my doctorate. I am very tempted to just tell him at this point that I would prefer to stick with part time so that I can get a better work and life balance until my degree is finished. I had been waiting on signatures for my current dissertation chapter and those just came through this morning. So lots of good news to celebrate! Have you dug into your red scraps yet? Now is the time.
