111 Farmer's Blocks ... DONE!

Well, Hello there!

I'm back from a little break.  We took off the last week of the kids' summer vacation to embark on an almost 1,000 mile road trip through Northern California.  We visited a couple of colleges my son is interested in attending next year and saw a play at the Ashland Shakespeare festival in So. Oregon.  All in all, it was a good trip.

I prepped a little hand applique project to take along with me on the trip (pictured above), but I didn't make much progress.  However, I just finished block #111 on my Farmer's Sampler his weekend!  I'm SO excited and in a little disbelief that I made all of those blocks.  I have a couple of minor piecing "mistakes" to fix, but I don't intend on remaking any of the blocks.  This project has been a journey, and I want to look at my quilt in the years to come and enjoy the full span of blocks from beginning to end, even with some of the "funky" fabric choices and less than perfect piecing.

Pretty cool, huh?  I bought the sashing fabric at Beverley's this morning.  I have a fat quarter of a yellow print I'd love to use for the cornerstones but I only have the 1 FQ and I haven't been able to identify the print.  I wasn't able to find something similar at Beverly's so I'm not sure what I'm going to do.  I will try to find something this week.  We'll see.

Here's a few pictures of my goofy kiddos from our trip:

Fresh Crop of Blocks

I've been madly farming away.

Over the last couple of weeks, I managed to sew blocks #76 Sawtooth, through #89 Steps to the Altar.  That's 13 blocks completed!  And only 22 to go.  Yay!!

My new mantra is A Block a Day until my FWQ is complete.  I really want to finish this up so I can move on to work more intensively on other projects and explore some different avenues in quilting such as art/landscape quilts.

Farmer's Wife Sampler - various blocks

I didn't take individual pictures of all of these blocks and I will just show groupings and feature a couple of individual blocks from here on out.  It's really time consuming to photograph each and every block, retouch, upload to flickr and then to the blog.  *phew*  Photographing ones work is really useful though, as I have just noticed that I have a piece flipped on my Squash Blossom block.  LOL

Here are a few of my recent faves:



#80 Single Wedding Star

 

#83 Spider Web


Lately, I've been struggling with finding fabrics without reusing the fabrics I've already used several times over, and so I reached out to my fellow quilt blogger friend, Beth, aka Smazoochie  who generously agreed to send me some fabric scraps.  Well, she really saved the day!  Her packaged arrived yesterday and I immediate set to work on this one:



#89 Steps to the Altar

 I hope everyone is enjoying their Summer!  We are enjoying the great outdoors on the weekends and our cute little chicks (farming of a different sort).  I can't wait for eggs!!!

Kayaking at Shoreline Regional Park



Our chicks at about 2 weeks old



Summer ... in Full Swing

My kids are the 3rd and 4th from left

The kids are off school and occupied with their summer activities, and even though I have to work, I'm enjoying the somewhat relaxed schedule and especially the homework-free evenings.  We haven't gone on a vacation yet (that's still in the planning stages) but we managed to get away to Santa Cruz for a day to celebrate my youngest 12th birthday.

I've been chipping away at my FWQ and but needed a change of pace, so I decided to put together a simple picnic quilt top.

I raided my large stash of mainly Alexander Henry fabrics.  It's kind of strange because I tend to buy most of my quilting fabrics in fat quarters, but over the years, I've amassed a large amount of yardage of AH prints (1 yard or more).  So when I decided I needed the satisfaction of putting together a simple quilt with large pieces (blocks are cut to 18" with simple sashing), I naturally turned to my AH prints.  I used Essex cotton/linen blend for the sashing.  It's the first time I've used Essex, and I love the hand and texture of this fabric.  I purchased the Essex from my local Beverly's which recently has stocked a really nice selection of Kona solids, Kauffman muslin (very high quality), and some other quality choices by other manufacturers.  I almost overlooked the Essex as it was mysteriously stocked next to the baby flannels.

I'm quilting it already... about a third of the way done.

And these are my latest FWQ blocks:

#72 Railroad 

#73 Rainbow Flowers

#74 Ribbons

#75 Rosebud

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer.

Can I bore you with yet more FW blocks?

Here's the whole she-bang for the year:

FW blocks

My apologies ... I was too lazy to move the lamp.

And the most current batch:



#67 Pine Tree

#68 Postage Stamp




#69 Practical Orchard

 



#71 Puss in the Corner



#72 Railroad

 That's it for now.  I noticed with my cut & pasting that my numbering system is a bit off, but I don't have my book with me so I'll have to correct this later.

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Other than sewing a few blocks this past weekend, I undertook a major cleaning of my sewing area (ahem, bedroom/sewing room).

Where the magic happens!

I cleared out literally an entire kitchen-sized garbage bag of tiny scraps!  There was no way I was ever going to sew with these snippets and it felt great to let it all go.  The green wastebasket (in front of the armoire) is what remains of my scraps... all good sized pieces, and the plastic box next too it is overfowing with larger yardages I'll probably never use.  I'm going to try to gift to friends and/or the day camp my daughter attends. 

If all else fails, I'll try to giveaway here, but this is not trendy stuff ... mainly older, out of fashion fabrics and some blenders my well-meaning husband gave me that I'll probably never use.