Well, that's a flimsy excuse

My triangle stars are now a flimsy.  Or a top.  (Could someone explain to me the difference?  Is there a difference?)  (I'm ancient - back in my day it was just called a top.)

I need a bigger design wall - this quilt measures 76" square and just overwhelms it.  (My 'design wall' is really just a big sheet of flannel clipped to a metal shelf unit, but it's still a step up from my 'design floor'!)

This next photo was taken before I got the top border sewn on, but you can see how I resolved the corners of the sawtooth triangle border.

That corner light triangle is trickier than it looks - the tip is a wider angle than the 45deg angle of the kaleidoscope ruler (which is the angle used throughout the quilt), but slightly narrower than the angle of the tri-recs ruler (which I think is somewhere in the 50's - google just failed me when I tried to look it up).  I did a bit of fudging and got everything to lay flat, finally.  (I'm extremely glad that squares only have four corners - by the fourth, I was actively cursing.)

I have enough of that lovely stop-border print to use for the binding.  Oooo - maybe with a flange binding, using light neutrals for the flange?  Hmm...

While I'm pondering that, I'm going to enjoy looking at this finished top.  Or flimsy.  Whichever it is.

Marching on into the green!

A new month means a new color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  Behold the first green Sand Castle!

My Goosey Temps quilt marches on into march, too.
January and February are pictured here side by side, next to my triangle star blocks.  (My camera positively hates taking pictures of these strips.  Every photo turns out blurry, no matter what setting I use.  I hope it likes the finished quilt or you're never going to get a good look at it...)

And here's my first March goose:

Speaking of photos, here are two that I forgot to include in my last post.  When I was cutting out triangles for the triangle stars, I saved the ends of the strips.  Waste not, want not, right?

I'm sewing them together to make full triangles and using them randomly in the borders, just for a little added sparkle.

Otherwise I'd probably be tempted to design a whole 'nother quilt just to use them up.  I could see that squirrel coming from a mile away.


Linking with Soscrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday and with Quilting is more fun than Housework for Oh Scrap!   Come see all the scrappy fun!

Up to my elbows in triangles

Some of them are even sewn together!

As of Sunday, my design wall looked like this -

and as I continued piecing those triangle stars, I started sewing leftover triangles into strips for possible border use.

Things really started to perk up when I pulled this piece of fabric (bought on a whim last year) out of the stash and auditioned it for a stop border.

And one thing led to another, and I suddenly had my nine stars done!

Let's turn the corner on that test border, shall we?

But wait!  Will those triangles look better with the darker ones towards the outside edge?

The answer is "yep."

So here's where it currently stands.

I think I'm going to like it!

There have been a few inquiries about the pattern for these stars.  I spotted the original pattern in a back issue of a quilt magazine (hurray for Friends of the Library Book Sales!) a couple of years ago, and have been randomly cutting and binning triangles for it ever since.  The pattern is available on the All People Quilt website (now for a fee), but there's a smaller version of it still offered for free.  (The stars are the same size (finishing to about 18.5"), but the freebie pattern only calls for four, and the stars are much less scrappy)
Here's the link, for those who are interested - Batik Triangle Stars.
You're welcome!

Of stars and sand castles

While I haven't managed to post much lately, I have managed to get a bit of sewing done.  Here's a peek at my design wall as of this morning.

You can see my Goosey Temps columns on the far left.  February is trying to catch up with January.  (I'm not going to tell Feb that no matter how hard it tries, it's always going to be shorter than Jan...)

With the addition of these two, I've now got enough yellow Sand Castles to make my heart happy.

And in between the geese and the strings, I've been chugging along with my triangle stars.  I sew triangles together into diamonds, then assemble two diamonds and a background triangle into these units.

Those get sewn together into half blocks,

and then the halves becomes wholes with the addition of corner squares.

Then one star becomes two stars,

and now I've got four completed stars and five more in various stages of finishedness.

My plan (at this moment) (and subject to change) (because I do that) (not that I'm a ditherer or anything) (decisive to the core, that's me) (uh huh) is to stop at nine stars and use leftover triangles to make a border around them.  It looks good in my head - we'll see how well that translates to fabric.
Because sometimes my plans work.  Really!

Linking with soscrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday and with Quilting is more fun than Housework for Oh Scrap!  Come see all the gorgeous scrappiness!

Sand Castles and other fiddly bits

I'm totally in love with my Sand Castles blocks.  I got one yellow block stitched up for February's RSC -

and then another.

Taking a closer look at those two I had to admit they were rather boring similar, so I'm going to have another dig through my yellow scraps and see if I can come up with something a little bouncier.  In the meantime, I grabbed another red for last month,

and then did one in a multi-color with no dominant color, which would have been hard to squeeze into RSC format.

Up on the design wall they went!

You can my goosey temperature blocks on the left.  Here's a close-up of the first week in February.

It was a goofy week, since we went from -10 to 62 in a 48 hour period.  It's hard to know how to dress...

I'd hung up a piece of a black starry print as a possible sashing for my geese, but I'm having my doubts about it since the darker blues disappeared right into it. Picking a sashing color is going to be a problem, since I've pretty much got every color involved in my temp scale, including white and gray which could have been tapped for sashing if I'd thought ahead at all.  (note to self:  try to think ahead more often)
It did occur to me that I hadn't used pink (though I'm thinking of using hot pink to indicate temps over 100 degrees this summer)  (hopefully there won't be much call for it) (because yikes!), so I grabbed the nearest hunk of pink (more of a coral actually) and hung it up behind the geese.

Eh.  On the other hand, I don't actually have to make a decision on this for another 10+ months, so I've got lots of time to dither.  (It has occurred to me that I could use the colors that are going to represent the high temp as sashing for the low temp months, gradually swapping them for low temp colors used for sashing in high temp months.  Sounds complicated and grisly, so I'll be giving it more thought.)  (The easiest way out would be to just skip sashing altogether, and that option is still in play.)

And you might have noticed that one big block trying to sneak into all the pictures.  I've got one triangle star to show off.

I've spent scraps of time over the last year or so, cutting triangles and sticking them in a bin.  The blocks are a bit nit-picky to sew, but I do love my fiddly bits.  There's no plan and no hurry - I just am in love with this block so I'm going to sew some stars.  Sort of a slow-motion squirrel, you might say.


Linking with soscrappy for ScrapHappy Saturday and with Quilting is more fun than Housework for Oh Scrap!  Come see all the golden scrappy wonders!

Every time I count these blocks, there seem to be fewer - so I'm going to stop

Counting them that is.

 My math said there should be 101 there, but when I counted them I only came up with 100.  So I counted them again just to be sure and that time I got 99.  I'm going to quit counting while I'm ahead.  Or at least before I get any further behind.  I'll keep working on them, since I still need about another kabillion for Good Fortune's first clue.

And as a plus, my red bin is getting refilled since I'm cutting strips in several sizes, as long as I've got fabric spread out on the cutting table.

And I'm even cutting for clue #2 - the blue HSTs.

Oh, and these other triangles, too.

Not that I'm starting a new project.

Because I'm totally not doing that.

I'm also not auditioning background fabrics.

Absolutely not.  No new projects here.

Just Good Fortune.  Totally concentrating on Good Fortune.

Absolutely.


Linking with Cynthia at Quilting is more fun than Housework for Oh Scrap!, because I've got scraps as far as the eye can see around here...
Also linking to Bonnie's Quiltville for the Monday Good Fortune linkup!  I'm going to continue to sew my bits for clue#1 and clue#2, and hopefully get further along before clue#3 comes out on Friday.  (Already looking forward to it!)