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.  😺

4th of July with no Fireworks

My quilt guild is putting together a calendar with a quilt photo for each month.  Guild members could submit photos to be included in the calendar.  They had to be 16" X 20" in size, and be representative of a particular month.  My month was July.  Without any particular plan, I started out with these fabrics:

I decided to make my quilt with 4-inch blocks arranged in a 3 X 4 setting.  I chose a LeMoyne Star for my block pattern, and used Electric Quilt to come up with a design.  In my head, I was thinking "Patriotic Fireworks".

I used Deb Tucker's Rapid Fire LeMoyne Star ruler to create the blocks, and played around with various combinations of striped and solid fabrics.  Using the red/white/blue striped fabric for all eight points of the star was rather dizzying to look at.  I decided that alternate points of navy blue would be better.

I quilted around each star, and used 3/8" spaced diagonal straight lines for the background.

The  16 X 20" size limit made it difficult to do much with sashing and borders. In the end, I went with no sashing, a 1/2" red border, and a 2" border of the Fireworks fabric.

This is the only picture I have of the finished quilt.  I brought it to our June meeting, thinking I would have the opportunity to bring it back home to get better photos of it.  However, the quilts were retained by the Calendar Committee for photography.

So here it is, July 4th, and I don't have my Fireworks quilt to display.  No problem.   It will be ready for next year, though!

Hope everyone has a Happy July 4th!

Snow flurries in April?

Thinking ahead for a class for Christmas I made a Snowflurries quilt from a pattern by Deb Tucker. 

I had never made any kind of LeMoyne star block before, so I did not know what to expect with all those tiny points.  But Deb has a technique that allows you to strip piece the units in the block and then trim them with her Rapid Fire LeMoyne Star ruler.

I chose fabrics that were not Christmas prints, but which were Christmas colors.

I started by piecing pairs of strips, and laying them right sides together

Next, I cut units on the diagonal.

Then I trimmed off one corner triangle,

and sewed that same triangle back to the original unit, but in a different location.  This is where it goes:

And this is what the units looked like afterwards.  Notice that each pair is a mirror image, and look at those white star points!  Perfect.

Then the real magic began.  I took the Rapid Fire ruler, lined it up at the inner tip of the star, and trimmed the outer edge to the perfect size:

When you sew the units together, you have one quarter of the LeMoyne star completed:

The final trim comes after you sew all four quarters together and you end up with a really perfect block:

After making the first block to understand the sequence, I did all the rest with chain piecing.  I like how Deb made some stars with half green and half red backgrounds and came up with this neat overall design.

I can imagine this pattern done is shades of blue and white to really feel like snowflurries.