If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake...

 In honor of all the birthdays, I designed a sweet little birthday cake mug rug.

This little cutie measures only 5 X 6 inches, and I made a batch of them for my quilt group. I started by searching my fabric stash for any fabrics that made me think of frosted confections and came up with these:

I envisioned a strip pieced project that wouldn't take too long to put together:

The strips for the cake layers went together quickly.

But that little cake stand pedestal was a bit of a bear.  Lots of tiny pieces,

and some fiddley piecing was involved before I came up with these:

Once the strips were all prepared, I was able to chain piece them together.  I used the striped fabric for the back, and did a pillowcase style construction to make them into mug rugs.  Then I stitched in the ditch to outline the cake.

Here are 11 little mug rugs so sweet you can almost taste the sugar! 😋

Things you do when you should be doing other things

I have a couple of quilts that need to be finished and bound before our upcoming quilt show, but instead I was making these:

I had attended a regional quilt show this past week and stopped at the Deb Tucker booth displaying all her rulers and patterns and this mini caught my eye.

Nine little LeMoyne Baskets that finish at 3 inches!  I already own the Rapid Fire LeMoyne Star ruler that the pattern calls for, so I purchased the pattern.  I opened it up at home just to see what I was in for, and I saw that it called for  strips  that measure 1 1/4".  Looking over at my cutting table, I also  saw this little container of strips that were leftovers from my Tumbling Blocks.

Well Geez!  How could I not  make a few blocks just to try the pattern?  (And, how about this cute little dish they were sitting in that I bought at TJ Maxx?)

So off I went, making a trial run of a few blocks, and after a while, there they were!

The bottom one is trimmed, the top one is not.  

Now that I have that out of my system, I can go back to doing the quilting tasks that I should be doing and put this project back on the Future Projects list.   But before I put it aside, I picked out all the fabrics for the rest of the LeMoyne star baskets and cut them to size.

Bye for now sweet little fabrics....I'll be back after the quilt show!

I'm linking up with Sandra and  other like minded quilters who run off chasing squirrels and" Drop Everything and Make It" over at mmmquilts .  So glad to know I'm not the only one.  😺

Rolling up my sleeves

My husband was shopping around for a protective sleeve for his computer tablet, so I offered to  make one for him.

I started with some Star Wars fabric:

I layered the fabric with some batting  and quilted it, using the narrow white margins in the pattern as my quilting guide:

Then, using a navy corduroy fabric for the lining, I sewed it up into a sleeve:

I sewed the corduroy with the nap of the fabric towards the bottom of the sleeve.  This made it easier for the tablet to slide down into the sleeve, and offered just a bit of resistance to help keep the tablet from sliding out of it.

Here it is, in use.

 (The tablet fits down into the sleeve.  I left it out for the photo.)

I think that truly this should be called a "tablet cozy", rather than "sleeve", don't you think?

True colors

The color that was chosen for this month's Rainbow Scrap Challenge was AQUA, and it seems that I am not the only participant who has had  a bit of trouble distinguishing between the colors of Aqua, Turquoise and/or Teal.  Or how about Cyan? Lets just go with bluish green and call it a month.  😊

Here are the Birds in the Air blocks I created  for this month:

And here is the crumb block that goes with it:

I get a lot of enjoyment out of choosing the fabrics for each month.  So much so, that I may have accidentally gone ahead and prepared the fabrics for some of the future months.  In fact, I may have also accidentally  decided to prepare both purple and red violet blocks even though there is only one month coming up designated as "purple". 😏

For now, here are the blocks I have completed so far:

It's starting to look like a rainbow!

My second project for the RSC is to applique my hexie blocks to a white background square.  I only had one aqua hexie, so I used this month to catch up on the red ones that would have been done back in February: