Cheddar Bow Ties -- My favorite kind of quilt!

I thought last week was the big reveal for Jo's Quiltville Challenge. Turns out that I had another week to get my binding on, so here it is again, all bound and ready to snuggle under! 

This is my absolute favorite kind of scrap quilt, the one where you get to use everything from the scrap bag as long as it's halfway decent quality. (And sometimes if it's less decent, if the color or print is exciting enough.)

I've got lobsters....

and geese and seahorses and the hind end of a Dalmation....

Halloween words and tea pots and teacups....

And spiderwebs and plaids and a zillion different kinds of flowers. It's like an I Spy for grownups!

So Close!

Jo from Jo's Country Junction has challenged the rest of us to finish up some of our Bonnie Hunter projects before the challenge starts. I'm going to sit out this mystery, but it was just the motivation I needed to pull out one of my favorite WIPs. 

I've got everything done but the binding. It's a little smaller than I'd originally planned, but I've fallen in love with another pattern that uses 2" bow tie blocks and finishing this one means I can get started on that one. 

Quiltville Challenge Update

It's starting to look like I'll meet Jo's challenge and have a Quiltville quilt finished in time for the reveal. 

I counted. And I counted again. And I'm still 22 bowties short. Frustrated isn't really the word for it, not when I didn't find out that there was a problem until I'd assembled the bowties into 12" blocks.

Here are the options I can see --

1) Make 22 more bowties and take apart a bunch of the blocks to scatter the colors evenly through the quilt.

2) Make 22 more bowties and carefully choose the fabrics so that they'll be varied enough not to look weird.

3) Make 2 more bowties and have a finished quilt that's six inches narrower than the original plan.

The first two options would never happen, so I'm going with the third. Or, I suppose, I could make enough bowties to make the quilt a lot bigger and then it would all blend together.

I'm going to go for a finished, slightly smaller than planned, quilt.

I Counted

I counted all of the bow ties and figured out that I was a hundred short. Then I found a few more that I'd pieced as leaders and enders and not put away with their friends, and I cut fabric and pieced a few more, and found a few more.

If my math is right -- and that's a big IF -- I need to cut and sew 31 more blocks. But I won't really believe that I have enough until the quilt top is assembled.

I can do this! I'm so glad Jo motivated me to pull these out and set a deadline.

My Bonnie Challenge Quilts

I won't be doing the latest Quiltville mystery, but I'm sure I'll love the finished quilt and wind up buying whatever book the pattern is reprinted in -- that happens every time!

Jo from Jo's Country Junction has challenged the rest of us to finish up some of our Bonnie Hunter WIPs before the challenge starts. That works for me even if I'm not planning on doing the mystery. I've been dying to get back to my lozenges.  

The last time I counted bow ties, I only needed another hundred and sixteen. I've made a handful since then, but have no idea how many. Guess that means it's time to do another count, as much as I dread the idea. Counting pieces just isn't fun.

It feels good to be sorting and cutting fabric again! I'll see which quilt I wind up making more progress on.

Cheddar Bow Tie Update 11/8/13

Even Jo and Nell's challenge wasn't enough to inspire progress on my bow ties this week. I cut and pieced twenty-two more blocks, which brings my total to 284.

Did I mention that I'm trying to use as many fabrics as possible? I'm only doing two bows in each print, which means a lot of extra sorting and cutting -- and, now that I've got more than half of my bows done, keeping track of which fabrics I have and haven't used already.

But it's worth it. I'm loving all of the geese and spiderwebs and other fun little details!

Cheddar Bow Tie Update

Jo and Nell issued a challenge to pull out a Quiltville WIP and finish the top before Bonnie's new mystery starts on Thanksgiving, and I pulled out my cheddar bow ties.

This week, I found 12 bow ties that weren't in the original count and pieced 22 more. That brings my total to 262 out of 400. And means that I need to dig out some scraps and start cutting! 

We were away from home for four days this week and I started thinking that I should have pulled out my scrappy Irish Chain instead. That one is a gift so it has a vague sense of deadline to it, and it needs fewer blocks to finish it. Then the crazy voices start whispering to me and I start thinking that maybe I should dig it out and try to finish them both this month...

Jo and Nell's Bonnie Challenge

Have you seen Jo and Nell's Bonnie Challenge? Before I was even finished reading Jo's post, I wanted to pull out my Texas Braid and start sewing away on it. There's just one thing holding me back -- that project has been missing for months.

I do have my big bag of cheddar bow ties, and I've counted them twice. I've got 228 bow ties finished, which means I need 172 more. Six or seven a day, which is totally do-able and I'll have enough to piece assemble the top.

It's not the piecing that's going to be a challenge, it's pulling scraps that I haven't already used in this project to cut more pieces from. I've got a hundred or so different fabrics here and I've totally lost track of what's in the quilt already.

And then I've got to cut more pieces for the border, which wasn't part of the original plan. As soon as I caught a glimpse of the border that Bonnie had added to her quilt, I knew I wanted one too.

This post is linked to Design Wall Monday over at Patchwork Times.

monday design wall

Are there some blog you read that just get you into trouble? I think Moose Bay Muses is one of mine. (The real culprit is Temecula Quilting, but it's the links from Karen's Blog that keep taking me there.)

A while back, I saw her post about the 2"  bow ties and fell in love. Even though I'm making slow progress, I'm having all sorts of fun with my cheddar bow ties.  Now that it's looking like I might actually reach the end of this quilt I think I want to play with a different layout or background color. Smaller bowties? That'll work!  The layout is in this post.  (I'm not claiming I'll actually make 1200 bow ties , but it's possible.)

Saturday morning, I saw Karen's post about the cake stand baskets and followed the link and SQUEEE!  Those are just so adorable!

Take a look at these pieces with the pieces of a bow tie block for comparison. They're tiny. (I think these might be the ones I had to replace because I'd read the measurements wrong for the second time, but even at the size they should be, they're itty-bitty.)

 

I didn't know if I'd be able to actually piece one of these little  cake stands or not, but I managed it. And I think I've got the patience to do at least a few more....possibly enough for a little quilt.

 

Strawberry Fields has held the record for the smallest units I've pieced to date. (There might be some smaller elements from the Quilt Square Quilt Along, but I'm not digging them out to measure.)

 

The cake basket blocks are smaller. One block is the size of  a patch from the postage stamp quilts I'm working on. And I managed to piece the thing....I think I'm a little bit giddy here...

For more design walls, head over to Patchwork Times.

another batch of bowties

I spent a chunk of yesterday afternoon sorting through the new-to-me fabric and some scraps I already had, cutting pieces for my ambitious scrap quilts. A  1 1/2" strip for Little Trips, the hearts, and the Lego quilt...a 2 1/2" strip for whatever, and a 2" strip for the bowties and whatever...

 

If my last count was correct, I only need about a hundred and fifty more bowties. Then it's time to assemble them and start fussing with the idea of a border. I wish I'd known I was going to have a border from day one, but I was bound and determined that this was going to be a borderless quilt until I saw Bonnie's and fell in love with her scrappy pieced border. It would be nice to have the same fabrics I used for the bowties in that border. But if I don't, who will ever notice?

To see more design walls, hop over to Patchwork Times. And come check tomorrow for the new baby quilt tutorial.

bow ties

This is the kind of quilt that makes me love my stash. Wild prints? Ugly prints? Little bit of this and that?

I've got 'em!

And I'm having all kind of fun going through my bags of scraps and picking out hunks that are wide enough for a couple of 2" squares.

To see more design walls, head over to Patchwork Times.

Cheddar Bow-Ties

I jumped on Bonnie's Cheddar Bow-Ties bandwagon as soon as she announced it. At first, I was going to play by the rules and just do them as leaders and enders, but that didn't work out so well. I lost a few and sewed a few together backwards and switched to a more forgiving leader and ender project.

Then Bonnie posted pictures of her quilt loaded onto the long arm and I started to wonder where my cheddar background fabric had gotten to... I think I was still up to my ears in the Nancy Drew quilt at that point. Something was going on.

Saturday, I was going through the dauntingly huge bag of scraps to cut squares for baby quilts and decided I should cut some bow ties while I was at it. I've cut and  pieced fifty bow ties in the past two days and I know there's a baggie of cut pieces here that I can't find.

They'll turn up before I'm ready to assemble the top. Or they won't.

To see more design walls, head over to Patchwork Times.

regrouping again

I don't like counting pieces of fabric. That's one of the reasons why I make so many of my quilts with 2 1/2" squares, so I can cut tons and tons of squares and use what I need and toss the rest into the box to use for the next quilt.

Orca Bay is going to involve a whole lot of counting, but I'm using every trick I know about putting things in stacks and pinning them together and writing myself notes. And sometimes you've just gotta count.



Not knowing how many strips I had was the biggest reason Quinn's Scrappy Trip Around the World has been stalled for so long. When I started the project, I didn't know how many green fabrics were in my stash, or how big I wanted the quilt to be. I cut strips from as many green fabrics as I could find in my stash, and the ones Jan sent me. Somewhere along the line I decided to make it 72" square.

Ever since, I've avoided counting my green strips. I don't know how many I started with, but I do know I've lost some. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were some partially assembled blocks around here someplace, but if I wait until I find them the kid will never have a quilt.



My goal for Sunday was to figure out how many blocks I had finished, how many blocks I had started, and how many strips I'd need for the rest. And to count the green strips.

I have exactly the number of strips I need. There is no excuse not to finish this quilt.

I know I've made more bowties than this! I remember sewing them in fabrics that aren't here...and I very vaguely remember deciding to put the finished ones in a safe place.




To see more design walls, head over to Patchwork Times. For more Orca Bay and Bow Tie progress, head over to Quiltville. And don't forget to check out my new pattern, 30s Barn Raising and enter to win a Moda Jelly Roll and the background fabric to make the quilt.