Patchwork Progressing Faster Than Home Renovations

Good Morning and Happy Wednesday, my lovelies!  I'll answer your top questions right off the bat:

1. YES, I'm still here.
2. NO, our home renovations aren't finished yet.
3. YES, I'm still sewing.
4. NO, I don't have much to show for it, though!

I'm still mostly on a break from the delightful-yet-challenging-and-tedious Stonefields sampler quilt, in that I haven't mustered up the creative energy to start prepping the next applique blocks.  I am, however, still stitching up hexagon rosettes for the outer border in the evenings.  Here's one of the latest finished rosettes:

No. 41 of 168 Rosettes Needed for Stonefields Outer Border

I've sewn 41 of the 168 hexagon rosettes for the Stonefields outer border so far, so I'm nearly 25% finished.  Slow going for sure, but I'm getting better at English paper piecing through the repetition and I don't need to think about what I'm doing nearly so much now as I did in the beginning, so it's perfect for keeping fidgety fingers busy in front of the television in the evenings.

Meanwhile, I've been making 9" 9-patch and 4-patch variations for that quilt based on Scrappy Celebrations.  When I abandoned this WIP (Work In Progress) over a year ago, I was feeling like it was burning up too much "good fabric" on a not-very-exciting project.  Now that I've been wasting investing such enormous amounts of time but very little fabric into each of those fiddly Stonefields blocks, it actually feels GOOD to burn up a little more yardage with simpler blocks that go together so much faster.  As in, six of these Scrappy Celebration blocks completed in a single day, compared to two or three weeks to complete just one or two of some of the more complex Stonefields blocks.  The projects balance one another out.  

Here are the completed Scrappy Celebration blocks on the design wall today:

37 Completed Scrappy Celebration Blocks (Out of ??)

I also have the next five blocks in progress at the sewing machine for chain piecing.  And yes, I am aware that I could have sped this up by strip piecing the 3" 9-patch units but I hate pressing strips open and didn't feel like doing the math to figure out how many strips to cut, etc.  

Detour: Scrappy Celebrations Sprung Out of Prison, Back On the Design Wall

Hello, and Happy 250th Anniversary Independence Day to all of my friends here in the United States.  I have been hanging out alone in my studio all day,  fiddling around with bits of fabric and trying not to dwell on memories of past Independence Days when we would take our young sons to my parents' house for a family cookout by the pool, with my mom and the boys splashing around in the water while my dad cooked burgers on the grill and played patriotic music on his outdoor speakers, wrapping up with neighborhood fireworks once it got dark.  I miss my parents, and I miss having family holiday celebrations even though we never did anything fancy.  Ah, well -- gotta enjoy the seasons we're in while we're in them, as this too shall pass and then I'll be missing when I used to be able to have a whole day all to myself in my sewing room, right?  Bernie has been traveling all week and I always get the blues when he's gone, but he'll be back by tomorrow night.  I get to go sing in church tomorrow morning, too, which always puts me in a good mood.  

So, after all of the annoyance and frustration of the last two appliqué blocks for my Stonefields sampler quilt project (left side of the design wall below), I decided I needed a palate cleanser with some instant gratification.  I remembered the Scrappy Celebrations project I abandoned a little over a year ago (read about that here) -- just what the doctor ordered.

Stonefields on Left, Scrappy Celebration on Right

I made eleven new 9" blocks for this quilt today, six of them four-patch with plusses:

Chain Piecing Six Blocks at Once