July

My sewing has been limited to doll quilts lately, due to time restrictions and the fact that my sewing room has been in guest room mode for a lot of the summer and I couldn't afford to make a huge mess with a bigger project and clean it all up before the next guests arrived. Mostly I've been working from my vintage fabrics, which I've been itching to get back to for a while.  Meanwhile, my blog has been on the back burner. I know ... I should have kept up and at least taken pictures along the way, but ... 

I got ahead of myself and decided to hang my new little quilts right away.

Here's a partial pano of my string of doll quilts hanging above the closet in my sewing room. I think youve seen most of these before, at one time or another. Can you tell which ones are comprised of vintage fabric?

Here's the other half of the pano. The red quilt on the left is a re-work of a doll quilt I made from a vintage block and some other pieces a few years ago, that I was never happy with. So I took it apart and re-designed it. 

                             

Its better now, but I'm still not crazy about it. You can see how degraded the fabrics are (not to mention dirty) Really, pretty junky but something made me want to rescue them (the pieces) and see what I could do. Oh well, I'll leave it alone for now. 

The three quilts on the right I made this month.

This is the third or fourth one of these simple one-patch mini's I've made from a stack of vintage (30's - 60's?) 16-patch blocks and they sure are fun. The fabrics are amazing, but I can only glean 2" squares from the individual patches, which is somewhat limiting. I still have a huge stack of them though, so there are sure to be more creations down the line.

This one is from the same bunch, but I cherry picked some of the more geometric pieces for it. I did use a contemporary fabric for the border, and vintage 60's (I think) for the binding. I hand quilted it with black thread, which was quite challenging visually. I finally took it outside where the natural light really helped. If you click to enlarge the photo, you'll be able to see the quilting better. 

This one was made from a different group of fabrics, mostly from a couple of vintage tops I deconstructed a while back. I struggled with what to do with the borders, and took it apart more than once. I ended up adding the red on top of the top and bottom bindings after the fact, which is why it looks so clunky. However it needed "something" ... and I like how it looks, clunkiness and all, and will leave it alone. For now, anyway. 

I have to say, this summer has been the busiest summer I can remember in many years, if not ever. In between several sets of guests, I made three back-to-back road trips (!) me driving, (!!!) which is huge for me. First a trip south to pick up my MIL and head to Temecula, where we shopped til we dropped at Temecula Quilt Co, and then Primitive Gatherings the following day. Oh, and a baby shower after the shopping trip. Busy busy. On the drive home, Apple Maps (or was it Google?) took me on a real adventure 😳 but I ended up finding my way home, safe and sound.

MIL Lela, above, and our sweet neice (Lela's granddaughter) Katie, who had her baby boy just about a week ago.
 

Next a fabulous quilt retreat in the Sierras with what we call our "beach" group. Not on the beach this year, but our hostess' home does have an amazing infinity pool! 

Lastly, I and my two best "crone" buds had our yearly rendezvous in Northern Cal and Oregon, which was the BEST, partly because we missed last year due to covid. 

Our attempt at a selfie in the redwoods. 😀 Can you guess which one is me?

Here's the link-up to Wendy Reed's "montly mini" page .. take a look!

love, Sandy                                                                                                (pssst ... bottom left)