Wednesday's UFO - Alaska Flowers and Berries

I'm spending most of my quilting time working on UFO's.  It has been a new challenge to work on one project and put it away at the end of the day and work on a different project the next day.  I like to work on something until it's done and each project is hard to put away for a week.  I am working on this Alaska flower and berry quilt on Wednesdays.  All of the pieces for the unfinished blocks were in a pile in a plastic bag.  Great storage-not!  I had pieces for 5 quilt blocks all piled together, so my first task was to find the pieces for each block.  

Some were labeled like this, what?

It turned out that all of the pieces had the label of the block they were part of, except one group and that group all went to the same block, the blueberry block.  

I separated all of the pieces into block piles.  This is the blueberry pile.  Look at all of those tiny pieces.

My next task was to lay the pieces onto the pattern page to see what I had and what I needed to cut.  They were all cut at one time, but who knows where the lost pieces went.

These pieces are for the lupin pattern.  I put all of my flowers and berries together and pressed them in place on my fusible applique' sheet.

Organizing, tracing, cutting and putting these flowers and berries gave me a bit of neck tension but they're done.  I will iron these onto their squares and they will join the rest of the bunch for top stitching...next Wednesday.

Linking To:  NTT,  Finished Or Not Friday, Can I Get A Whoop, Whoop

Stepping Stones UFO

When I dug into this project, I almost put it back.  Thank goodness I'd posted it as a UFO I planned to finish or I would have returned it to the deep, dark UFO pile.  This pattern is called Stepping Stones by Judy Niemeyer.  I took a three hour class to make this quilt but you know only so much can be done in 3 hours.  There are 3 different blocks titled J, K and L, and you make 12 of each block for the quilt.   The teacher reminded us that we would sew one black strip to block K and I was sure she said to the beginning of the block.  Of course it was the end of the block, the last seam not the first!  I had sewn all 12 K blocks with the black strip first so I had to rip...grrr.  In addition to this mistake I had sewn an extra strip to all of the L blocks, so that had to be ripped too.  

You sew the J, K and L blocks together to make one unit for the setting.  I ripped and sewed to make this unit.  I had to have a little satisfaction at the end of a frustrating sewing day.

I decided on the layout and pinned the blocks together in sets of three.  You can see some of the K blocks have been ripped and just need to be sewn back together, and some still need to be ripped out. I will finish each set, one at a time, which includes more ripping and sewing.  I put this away until next Monday.  Stay tuned.

Linking to:  Let's Bee Social,  Midweek Makers, NTT, Beauties Pageant 6, Off The Wall Friday, Design Wall Monday

What? When Did I Make This?

I started my blog 3 years ago in October.  The challenge of learning how to operate the blogger program along with the fun of crafting and cooking and taking pictures of things I love kept me motivated for almost 2 years.  Then I stopped, almost cold turkey.  I'm not quite sure why, but maybe life just got in the way.  Last month, I decided to start blogging again but this time rather than 3 posts a week about all kinds of things, I am only posting once a week and all of my posts will be related to sewing.  For the past 5 weeks, this schedule has been manageable and fun.

The best thing about this posting strategy is that I am able to spend more time visiting quilt blogs and learning about the amazing things quilters are doing.  I recently stumbled on the blog, Red Letter Quilts.  Heidi's blog has a monthly link  One Monthly Goal (OMG) that inspires quilters to finish their projects by encouraging them to set a goal for the month and follow through.    She even offers a chance for a prize to people who meet their goals.

I thought I'd give OMG a try.  I pulled out my cob-web covered UFO tub; seriously, totally untouched for years, to look for a UFO to compete.  I did a little digging and pulled out this little bag of goodies.

When I looked at it, I could not remember ever working on this quilt project, I could not recall when I did it or what it was.  About 10 years ago I was developing mystery quilts for monthly classes and maybe this was one of the patterns I was working on; or  it could be that I saw a pattern and liked it and wanted to try it.  Since I put the time in to cut out all of the pieces, I thought it would be a good idea to put a little more time into it and finish the top.  I'm sure glad I did one block so I know what to do with all of these pieces because there is no pattern in the bag.

I have a good friend who loves pansies and her birthday is in May...is it possible?  Wish me luck.

Linking to: OMG, MCM, Monday Making, Handmade Monday, Sew Cute Tuesday, Linky Tuesday, Let's Bee Social, NTT, Midweek Makers, Finished or not Friday, Can I Get A Whoop Whoop, Show Off Saturday