Birds of Paradise Stack and Whack -- the End

For your viewing enjoyment,  60 of the 74 blocks that I made from the Birds of Paradise fabric.  These were by far my favorite of all the stack and whacks I have done.  Now to just figure out how I want to set them!!  Many decisions including size, set and whether to use the matching posie blocks, of which I have 104!!  I suspect there is more than one quilt here!!

Part 2!

Part 3!

As I am still confined to the downstairs and doing all my sewing sitting on a bed with the sewing machine in my lap, I sent dear husband up to the sewing room to find my plastic bag full of house parts.  Three trips later and many plastic bags later, he still couldn't find them! He did find a bag of kaleidoscope triangles from a project where I had overachieved the cutting!!  So there will be some kaleidoscope quilts to be made til the pieces run out -- there are fewer blue pieces than the lighter background pieces.  This is a common set of this pattern but I hadn't done one myself before.

I also found a few bags of strips so will sew those together as well.  Wed I go back to the surgeon and maybe will get this cast off and something else put on but don't know.

Sitting outside, I always have my camera to capture some bird pictures.  Today, it was damselflies.  Although I a having some difficulty with identification, I think this is a female Ebony Jewelwing as that was the only one in the book with the white wingtips.   I took about 100 pictures to finally get this one as it is very difficult to get a pic of a small skinny dragonfly sitting on an azalea!

And surprisingly, I saw another damselfly on our Japanese Cherry a few minutes later but it didn't pose quite as nicely and didn't show me his wings.  I believe it is a  male Ebony Jewelwing.  Is romance in the air?

Near the End of Stack and Whack Mania...

 Well this is a change of pace -- hexagons!  This was the first night of something a little different and I wasn't sure how these would be as some of the former ones I wasn't that crazy about (which makes the resulting quilts easier to donate!!)  This was kind of a busy print.  The strips were 3 1/2 inches and the blocks will be about 6 inches across

There were 27 resulting hexagons from the piece of fabric I had.  I am going to put the  into three long strips with strips of fabric in between to make it about 40 x 60 finished  Haven't decided what to use surrounding the blocks but it just  may be white.  These are blocks I want to feature and allow you to clearly see as they are individually each quite pretty I think!

This was my favorite piece of fabric that was hard to cut into!  The repeat was about 24 inches.  I decided to cut it into kaleidoscope pieces as well as posies as I liked the design I did last summer which included both those in the same quilt.  It will be either a very large quilt or more than one quilt.

I couldn't wait the first night so did a few just to see how the posies would look.  Since I had eight repeats of the design, I cut 8 of the same design and then used them to make two different blocks.  Here you can see the "sister" blocks next to each other as I began.  They will finish to 4 inches.  I counted them last night and I have 102 blocks to do altogether!!  Again, not sure how I will finish them.

Here is a whole lot more of the posie blocks from this fabric and I am loving all the differences and amazed at how different some of the "sister" blocks are from one another.  I've only done about half so far!

Greetings From Sick Bay! (But Still Sewing)

This was batch number 2 from which I showed a couple of blocks in my last post.  Relatively pleased but trying to decide on framing which will probably be black again.

From this fabric, I made both 4 inch blocks (these) and 6 inch blocks (the next picture).

Just for a change of pace, I am doing these hexies which will finish to about 6 inches from straight edge to straight edge.  I have finished 20 already and there will be a total of 27.  They turned out better than I thought they would as the fabric is very busy and sometimes this doesn't work well.

One thing I have noticed with all these stack and whacks, is that I must be pinning much better initially as they are very symmetrical.  After I complete this baggie, I only have one left but it contains both posie blocks and octagonal blocks and I think there are quite a few.  After that, I will get my hubby to get a bag of strips (or 2) from my sewing room and I will just sew strips together.  You can always do things with strips! 

Back to Some Sewing!

Okay, this is the third time I have tried to type this post!  I keep erasing the whole thing somehow and no way to get it back.  This is the Janome 760 that a friend from RAFA lent me so I could sew with my feet elevated!  It is super easy to thread, use and control with the start/stop and speed controls right in front.  I have finished up bag one of the stack and whack posie pieces I got together before the surgery.  It has been four weeks today since getting the surgery.  I am supremely thankful for my knee scooter and now my butt cushion which I ordered from Amazon and has made sitting all the time much much easier.  My tailbone was really hurting a lot and I had to shift around constantly wherever I was sitting.  

These are the first four blocks I did just to see how they would look.  I am never certain how it will go until I start sewing them together.  There are 72 of these altogether.  I had 8 repeats of each image so did two variations from each set of 8 block 1 and 4 use the same pieces.

I managed to find a small design wall downstairs left over from a talk I gave so set it up on my sofa across the room from where I sew.  Kneeling on my scooter, I am able to place the pieces up on it although some are a stretch!  There are at least a couple of matching blocks here.  Can you find them?

Here are the next 20 although a bit fuzzy as I am still using my phone camera.  There are matching blocks here also!  I had thought I would surround each block with a yellow, green, orange or fuchsia border and then a black one to frame them but have decided that a black border and then the multiple colors will work better.  Haven't decided on sashing yet but none of that will happen until I have access to my sewing room again which is upstairs!

I wanted to see how the next bag of blocks would go.  I only have 36 of these.  You might notice that both of these have black backgrounds as do the other bags of blocks.  I used to prefer darker colors up here in NY but prefer lighter ones down in NC.  To save myself time and energy, I bought a whole bunch of pre-wound bobbins with black thread on Amazon -- very cheap and came in a small plastic box as well.