Pi Day!

I made these for Squiddle's class:

The upper two are apple, the lower two are blackberry (from the berries I picked last summer).  I am a little disappointed in the other parents, because out of 39 sets of parents, only myself and one other parent signed up to bring in pies for pi day.  (And she only brought in one.)  I get that not everyone bakes, but surely it's not that hard to buy one from the grocery store?

(I would have done two more - pumpkin - but I literally did not have any more pie plates.)

Old Quilts and Modern Activities

So in the process of going through antique malls and shops with my mother, there have been a couple quilts that caught my eye.  It's funny how few quilts there are in such places nowadays!

Snowball isn't an uncommon design, but I loved how the center ones were scrappy and then there were three rows of controlled color border.  I think the finished size of the snowballs on this one were about 2 1/2".

A largeish block, but one that could be fun to make in a scrappy assortment

And an applique sailboat design that I'd not ever seen before.

Let's see... what else has been going on?  We went to Emerald City Comic Con a couple weeks ago, the first convention Wonderful Husband and I have gone to in what must be close to six years now.

Jazzy and Squiddle held up marvelously, far better than I had expected.  Jazzy got an articulated 3D printed dragon, Squiddle a Litten plushie and keychain (each of them spending their own money), Wonderful Husband a dice game, and I found a flight of actually spicy hot sauces from Gindo's.

I am now considering whether or not I (we) also want to attend Norwescon in a couple weeks.  There are an awful lot of writing panels I'd like to attend....

In between now and then, Wonderful Husband and I have tickets to see Rent at the Tacoma Little Theatre.  Unlike Cats a couple months back, we decided this one is not age-appropriate for Squiddle and Jazzy.  The last time we saw Rent was in NYC when he proposed to me!

Clearing Things Out

So among the mess atop my sewing table was this bundle of 9 1/2" Friendship Star blocks, which I had apparently won from the Orange Grove Quilter Guild... at least six years ago.

Seventeen blocks doth not a quilt make.  And even after I made three more red stars, I was still going to have one extra blue.  Oh well, put it in the corner, no one will ever notice that the last diagonal stripe is blue not red.

Ramen has taken to his role as the household's new quilt inspector quite well.

I had a nearly-a-yard remnant of red from Joann's Fabrics that I had intended for some other purpose, now forgotten.  It made the sashing.  Plus I'd picked up a couple yards of red and blue stars on white print from St. Vincent De Paul for a mere $.65, which was probably the impetus for finally working on these blocks.  That fabric became cornerstones and, eventually, the outermost border.

I dug through my blues to find one which looked good for the middle border.  You can't really see it, but unlike the red, it is hella pieced.  Very weirdly shaped scrap!  But it's mostly used up now.

And finally I did math to figure out how wide to make the outer border to use up as much of that stars fabric as I could.  It looks kind of dingy in this shot; it's better in person.  The final measurement is 69 1/2" x 59 1/2".  It's currently folded and hung up in the closet, waiting its turn to be quilted.