Monday, February 19, 2024

Tilda 9-Patch Celebration, First Blocks Completed

 Good Monday morning, quilty peeps!  Remember those Tilda precut fabric bundles I bought last week?  Today I actually have a couple finished blocks to show for myself!  This low-stress chop-and-sew project is loosely inspired by the Scrappy Celebration 2023 APQ Quilt Along project, and the pattern is available here.

9 inch Finished Block

For the time being, at least, I’m limited to working with fabric pieces that are either fat quarters (18” x 21”) or fat eighths (9” x 21”) and I only have one piece of each color or print.  I also have a bolt of Moda Bella Solids Off White.  So my original intention was to make six identical blocks using the fabric combination shown above, but I didn’t have enough of the bubblegum pink solid fabric.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

New Fabric, New Project (Maybe): Scrappy Celebration Quilt in Tilda Prints and Solids

Good morning and Happy Thursday from sunny Naples, Florida!  ðŸŒž. I’m in limbo right now, moved out of our old house in Charlotte, North Carolina, but we don’t close on our new house here in Naples, Florida until next Tuesday the 20th.  My entire fabric stash, all of my rotary cutting tools and rulers, and all of my current works in progress are packed up in boxes that have not yet been delivered, but I do have access to my AccuQuilt GO! fabric cutter and all of my dies, my Bernina 475QE and my vintage 1935 Singer Featherweight 221 sewing machines, my travel iron, Best Press, and a tabletop ironing mat, and a bolt of Moda Bella Solid fabric in Off White.  These items traveled to Florida with me in my car so I have them in our temporary housing situation.  My husband is abandoning me for a couple of days for a business trip to Ft. Lauderdale, so I decided to self-medicate my moving jitters with a quick fabric shopping trip to my new LQS/Bernina & Baby Lock dealer, Flash Sew & Quilt.

New Tilda Precuts for Scrappy Celebration Quilt (Maybe)

I know, I know — if there’s one thing a quilter becomes acutely aware of when packing for a household move, it’s how much more fabric she already owns than she could ever reasonably use within her lifetime…  But medical science is making advances every day, and the cost of fabric keeps going up, so I’m rationalizing that I am wisely buying fabric while it’s still affordable, before global warming makes the planet too hot to grow cotton anymore, and I need to buy enough of it in case scientists cure everything and I am still here quilting away in my 200s.  Ahem.

In all seriousness, though, I was judicious with my purchases.  I bought precuts because they will be easier to manage with my GO! cutter on a kitchen table than yardage, and I didn’t want to buy enough for a whole new quilt, just enough to give me something to cut up and sew back together again for stress relief over the next couple of weeks until I get my hands on the rest of my stash.  I bought a fat quarter bundle of Tilda Solids and several fat eighth bundles of the newer Tilda print collections that I don’t already own, knowing that I have bundles and scraps of older Tilda prints (leftover from my Halo quilt) that will coordinate with the new stuff.  I also bought myself a pair of fabric scissors (the purple handled micro serrated Karen Kay Buckley Perfect Scissors) so I can rough-cut my Bella Solid Off White yardage and my fat quarters before running them through the die cutter, and I bought some pins and a spool of neutral Aurifil 50/2 cotton thread because I’m pretty sure both of my travel machines are current threaded with the dark navy I was using for my Deco quilt.  (Side note: TOTAL BUMMER that I packed my Deco Quilt and my FrankenWhiggish Rose projects in boxes and loaded them into the moving pod, because either of those projects would have been ideal to work on right now).  

The quilt you see on my iPad in the photo above is Scrappy Celebrations by Lissa Alexander for American Patchwork & Quilting, and it was a quilt along project in 2023.  I haven’t purchased the pattern and don’t intend to — I like the idea of mixing up a variety of 9-patch and 4-patch blocks but I’m not interested in making the exact quilt, and I definitely don’t need any instructions for such simple blocks.  I’m sure the pattern instructions call for rotary cutting and strip piecing anyway, which I won’t be doing since I don’t have any of those tools available right now.  

You know what else I don’t have access to right now?  My computer!  I’m writing this post on my iPad right now and it’s really annoying.  I am missing my big desktop monitor where I can do photo editing and have multiple windows open for adding links etc.  And by the way, my email subscription service is still paused (need to work some kinks out with that) so that’s why this post wasn’t delivered to your in-box even if you’ve subscribed to receive my blog posts that way.  Honestly I don’t know when I’m going to have time to deal with that, so please check here on the blog from time to time for new posts.  Thanks for understanding.

I hope you’re all sewing and quilting up a storm wherever you are today!  I’ll be linking up today’s post with the following linky parties:

MONDAY

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts  

TUESDAY

To-Do Tuesday at Quilt Schmilt  

WEDNESDAY

Midweek Makers at Quilt Fabrication

Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter

THURSDAY

Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation  

FRIDAY

Peacock Party at Wendy’s Quilts and More

Can I Get a Whoop Whoop? at Confessions of a Fabric Addict

Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

Off the Wall Friday at Nina Marie Sayre

Beauty Pageant at From Bolt to Beauty

 TGIFF Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday, rotates, schedule found here: TGIF Friday

SUNDAY

Frédérique at Quilting Patchwork Appliqué

Oh Scrap! at Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework