Vintage Sheets All Cut Up

First, thanks for the opinions on the previous post!  I’ve decided diagonal and larger (more usable size), so I have 8 more blocks to make.  I’ll be working on that again…someday.

A week or two ago I received back my selection from the Vintage Sheet Fat Quarter Swap I joined.  There’s nothing like getting new-to-me fabric in the mail!

Here are the fat quarters I received:

AND, I already got busy on them!

Yep, 5 quilt tops done!  The ones with pink are 40″ x 48″, where the blue one is a wee 32″ x 40″.  I don’t want these vintage sheets to mix with my stash since they aren’t 100% cotton.  The best way I knew to keep them from mingling was to go ahead and make them into stuff, and that’s exactly what I did! 

The tops are kind of boring, but they will serve a purpose:  having some tops I can easily quilt up when random cousins, etc. have babies.  My husband already has *another* cousin who just had a little girl, so she’ll be getting one of these tops.  So I need to at least get one of these quilted pretty quickly!

Problem is, even with 5 tops I still haven’t used up all the vintage sheets!  But I’m kind of bored with these quilts at this point, so I will be putting them aside in a separate bag right now.

But I did save a couple of my fave sheets to become stuffed animals – can’t wait!  In the meantime, I’ll show complete pictures of the quilts once they’re, well, complete!

Need Opinions!

I have quilt blocks, but now I need to figure out what to do with them!  So, commenters to the rescue, right?

I made this set of blocks mostly out of the Big Box of Free Fabrics (love them!) and using this book:  Simply Charming

I bought the book specifically for this pattern, although it’s fairly easy to figure out on one’s own, and I’m hoping to make Simply Twisted from the same book at some time just because.  But the box of fabric inspired me to do this Charming Flowers.

I’m to the point where I need to make a decision though, and I’m indecisive.  Important note:  I have no plans for this quilt.  Considering giving it away as a baby quilt, BUT I have ended up really liking it so maybe it can be a House Quilt for me!  (would thus want lap size most likely).

The Options (blocks aren’t in any specific order in my example pictures – just thrown up there to check things out):

A)  Make it as originally designed in the book, with a straight set and borders.  Final size = 52.5″ x 70.5″.

 

B)  Put it on the diagonal and make it smaller.  I would have 6 extra blocks I could put on the back or do whatever with.  Oh, and the triangles on the ends would of course be green.

 According to my handy-dandy Taking The Math Out of Making Patchwork Quilts (which every quilter should have – great book!), putting it in this 3 x 4 setting would result in a quilt sized 38.25″ x 51″.  I’d most likely add a 1″ inner pink border and maybe a 4″ outer green border, so let’s call it 48.25″ x 61″.

C) Put in on the diagonal and make it bigger.  I would need to make 8 more blocks to do this.  According to Taking the Math Out, this 4 x 5 setting  would give a 51″ x 63.75″ quilt, so with borders lets call it 61″ x 73.75″.

 

This picture of course is not accurate since it’s missing 8 blocks – mentally add another 3-flower row and another 4-flower row to the bottom.  And if choosing this option, what do you think?  Add more light pink and medium pink flowers?  or some purple ones too?

By the way, non-quilters can give an opinion too!  I know you’re out there and you can tell me too what you like best!

Thanks!

Cheyenne Mountain Zoo

Yay!  I finally have access to the computer with photos!  I hope to have some quilt block pictures to share tomorrow, but in the meantime I thought I’d show Round 1 of our Colorado vacation pictures.  (I know, I can hear the excitement from here b/c other people’s vacation photos are simply The. Best.)  🙂

Anyway, our first full day in Colorado we spent at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.  It is small, but totally awesome.  I mean Look!  You can feed the giraffes!

They had a couple dozen giraffes and a walkway built high around it.  You obviously couldn’t feed the giraffes just anything, although Julia tried to give them popcorn.  You bought special giraffe crackers for cheap and then found a willing giraffe.  You could feed them over the fence as we did, but the little ones could also feed them through the fence posts. 

Julia LOVED it, and wanted to feed them her popcorn too.  Elena was a bit grossed out by their tongues and wanted down pretty quickly!

The zoo really is built on the side of the mountain, and you actually climb the equivalent of an 11 story building from the entrance up to the grizzly bears at the top.

I don’t have any pictures of the real grizzly bears (which was an awesome exhibit), but here are ours (with their cousins whom we were visiting):

And here’s an example of the great views of Colorado Springs you got as you kept climbing up the zoo.

Another exhibit the girls LOVED and that we spent forever in was with the sea otters.  They had a bunch of them and they were so playful!

 

But, wouldn’t you know it, one of the biggest hits of the zoo were…the animal benches. 

Ha!  Who cares about REAL animals when you can climb on the fake ones!

The girls had a great time.  The animals were mostly awake, the tigers played like kitty cats, and we walked in 80 degree temps instead of the 100s.  Heaven!

Updates

Just a couple updates:

*Julia has been holding onto her quarter/nickel for 8 days and counting now.  Talked to the doctor today and she said call back in a week if we still haven’t seen it and we’ll consider more x-rays.

*Elena is healthy, but still hasn’t recovered mentally from her sick stomach episode on 4th of July. A couple months ago she saw a kid get sick and she heard that he got sick b/c “he ate too much.” So now Elena is scared of eating. She’ll whine to us constantly that she is starving, but then when you put the food in front of her that she specifically requested she’ll take 2 bites and refuse to eat more, telling us that she doesn’t want to eat too much and make her tummy sick. The doctor gave us some “medicine” to use as a placebo. It is kinda sorta working. She’ll now eat 3 bites. 😦

*I have cut into the Big Box of Free Fabrics and it was so much fun! I have a pattern I’ve been wanting to make, but this box kicked me in the butt to actually do it! Don’t the fabrics look so pretty all cut out and ready?

I started sewing them today. 75% are from the Big Box of Free Fabrics — I added in some of my own to complete the collection I wanted. I’m hoping to have lots of free time to sew this weekend and make some serious headway on this — it’s small so should go fast. Yay!

My Poor Girls and Fun Nine Patches

I’ve been meaning to get up some Colorado pictures, but I haven’t had the opportunity yet.  Elena has been struggling off and on with some stomach issues, although she seems to finally be on the mend.

And Julia.  Ahhh, my poor Julia.  She apparently ate a coin.  We know from x-rays that it really was a coin, although it is still under debate whether it’s a quarter or a nickel.  (It got stuck with much gagging for a while.)  We are now on 48+ hours of diaper inspection.  Unless something miraculous happen in the next few hours, we will be heading back for x-rays in the morning and seeing if it is still in the stomach or if it is on its way out.  Let’s hope it passes and we don’t have to do anything invasive.  My poor girl.

By the way, do you know how hard it is to feed two children when with one you’re trying to stop things from moving, and with the other you’re trying to keep them moving???  Eek!  Elena’s been jealous of Julia’s juice, but she doesn’t realize that Julia’s juice is laced with laxatives, which Elena definitely does NOT need now!  Anyway, enough making your stomachs turn.

In the meantime, before vacation I received my first group of nine patches from the Three by Three swap.  Looking good!

And I made and mailed off my next blocks!  I’m a little worried now after seeing them with others that they are not medium enough and too light, but I really hope people like them – I thought they were fun.

Thought I needed to get the post of all my free fabric off the top to stop the rampant jealousy!  OH, and I am already working with those fabrics — details to be provided soon!

32.5 pounds

Wow.  Just wow.  I will never be able to say I’m not lucky again!

I was at a quilt shop at the end of last week and talking to one of the employees about wanting to make a string quilt but that I was still in the ‘collecting’ phase of that quilt.  One of the other customers heard the conversation and asked me if I wanted her scraps to help add to my collection.

I must admit I was hesitant, not wanting somebody else’s 1980’s brown calicoes, but she assured me that they were the same kind and quality as in the quilt shop where we were.  And she told me she had a HUGE box.

THEN she gave me her business card so I could call her to pick up the box, and *immediately* upon seeing that I got all sorts of excited.  I mean, check her out:  Art Quilts by Kathy York. I had voted for her before for viewer’s choice at a quilt show, and I’ve checked out her blog before!  (This was the quilt I voted for for viewer’s choice — sadly it is missing now, but what a great quilt!)  Certainly her scraps had to be good!

And the scraps were GREAT.  And my goodness, she was not kidding when she said the box was HUGE.  Seriously.  It contained 32.5 pounds of fabric! (yes, I did actually weight it!)

Before we left for vacation, I pulled everything out just to get an idea of what bounty I received.  And Oh Boy, was it a bounty.  Here it all is – laid out a bit at a time (Click on a picture to enlarge):

(If someone can tell me how to make a gallery  containing only some pictures instead of ALL of them, I’d be most appreciative.)

And, um, scraps?  Many (most?) are fat quarters, and there are even a yard piece or two!

And I must admit I was *most* excited about these fabrics.  After pulling everything out to look at them, I separated out the batiks, hand-dyes and solids since I store them separately from my other fabrics.  (Who am I kidding?!  I certainly will separate out the hand-dyes now, but I never had them in the past!)  These beauties will immediately be put in my stash once I finish unpacking from vacation!

These fabrics were in the prior pictures – I just wanted to separate them to see them in all their glory!

SO, it looks like I have a string quilt in my near future!  And I also have been dreaming up some other ideas for these fabrics.  OH, and I will certainly be passing on any that just simply don’t belong with me.  Kathy was initially going to drop these off at the guild freebie table, so anything I don’t keep will definitely go there.

Thanks again Kathy!