Straits of Mackinac

I started my second quilt for 2017 :) I fell in love with the mock up that Bonnie Hunter had blogged about in November, and it has been on my mind ever since.  I pulled out blue strips from my bin and started sewing!  So far I have all the large triangle pieces needed, but now I need to figure out what I want to do for the background.



I was thinking about a neutral cream or white, but yellow is really calling to me.  I pulled the majority of my stashed yellows, and I think I do like it.  I know what my friend Mary is thinking about the yellows :)

I'm also trying to figure out Instagram.  When I upload a photo, I find that I have an option to also post to flickr (where I host my blog images).  However... I haven't seen it actually post to flickr yet.  I'm not sure what I am doing wrong with that.  Has anyone else had success with posting there?  I'm taking a break with facebook (the politics are draining me!) so I have decided to start using my instagram account.  I only started one years ago to see what my son was posting, but now I'd rather start seeing fun images so I think I am going to start going there instead of facebook.  Anyway, if you have any tips, please send them my way!

Pink Lemonade using Kona COTY, Flamingo

I have been getting the Quilty Box subscription now for four months.  I have purchased a couple of boxes in the past, but hadn't subscribed until recently.  Honestly some of gadgets are interesting, but many I probably wouldn't buy.  However I did see in a month before I subscribed that the MQC's binding tool was included (I already have two sizes), so I do think they have great value.

In the last box was a jelly roll of some Kona strips and a pattern focused on the Color of the Year, Flamingo.  I've been wanting to dig into it for the last couple of days, but today I finally did some sewing.  It is a very easy pattern, and the top was finished within about two hours.  I think I may send this one down to my granddaughter who is ready for a bigger girl quilt.


I haven't decided if I will make a larger strip border to frame or leave it as is.  I would like to make it a little larger than the 46ish"x62ish".  Though the yellow in this quilt (Buttercup) is slightly more subdued than last year's COTY (Highlight), I may try out some strips of it and see how it goes.  I don't think I have any solid pinks on hand.

The other pink is pretty bright (my camera really didn't capture the colors well here), and is called Pomegranate.


Anyway, this makes my first quilt start for 2017.

First Finish of 2017

I really didn't think I would be finished with this little quilt today, but I am!  I had the embroidery left to do before quilting, and I had been putting it off.  Because we had a guest over New Years Eve/Day, my quilt room was turned into a guest room so I didn't have access to my machine.  It's been a few days since finishing up the last quilt (hexagons) so my fingers have healed up from sewing the binding.  As I mentioned in that post, that quilt really was a difficult one to work on--and in the end, painful!  Most quilts aren't like that where I am fighting sewing bindings and whatnot, but that one was from almost the very beginning.



So since no quilt room/machine, I decided to pick up a hand project and Minnesota Flurries it was!  I didn't expect to be completely finished today, but I just finished hand sewing the binding and the snowflake buttons down. The binding is a dark green fabric that I had left over from the quilt top in the pic below.

The only real change that I made to the pattern was to turn two snowmen corners so they were all facing the same direction.  I want to hang up this little quilt, so that seemed to be obvious. If I used it as a table topper, I would have left the corners alone.

This is a top I finished up a couple of days ago and is now ready to be quilted.  I plan to baste it tomorrow (but I need to figure out the backing first... I do have a lot of fabric leftover that I could piece together a backing with).



I thought I would try to applique the tree without fusible, and after sewing down the trunk and branches I had enough of that.  Not only did I have to deal with little whiskers of fabric, but you can see the trunk seems to be doing a little wiggle :)  It will likely not be as noticeable after quilting is finished... but geez!  That quilt was a project that I bought last year when it was half off after Christmas.  I still have one more winter-style quilt to work on from that spending spree.  I really like this quilt much better in person vs the photo, and I was thinking about changing it up by adding the blocks around the tree instead of just top/bottom and the two sides (for more of a "round robin" style).  In the end, I went with the pattern.


What was kind of fun was that this quilt kit came with a fabric called "strip it".  It is basically yardage of strips.  You can get a larger assortment of prints for a quilt project, and depending on how you cut the fabric, you can make half square triangles without the work.  I didn't do that method because I was confused at first (this section of instructions was just before I got sick), but after figuring out the instructions, it is a neat idea.  I think I have about a yard and a half left and there are like 20 or so stripes that are 2.5" wide going across the width of fabric (this is half of WOF, the other side after the fold repeats).

I guess you could say I'm not tired of Christmas yet... still working on it :)  Though, my other quilt kit that I mentioned is more "icy" fabrics vs Christmasy.

Happy new year!