Quilting is piling up!

As if I don’t have enough quilting I should be doing, I just had to take a pause and whip up some blocks. First up is the April block for The Honey Pot Bee called Starry Sky designed by Kylie @APerseveringMom. This is a paper pieced block and I really enjoyed making it – don’t you just love how all the points are so precise!!

Next, when the call went out from @Devotedquilter for block donations I just had to answer. A senior’s home across the road from her burned down. All of the residents got out safely and have been placed in other care facilities or are staying with family for now, but they lost everything. She has graciously committed to making a quilt for each of the residents but since there are 21 of them she needed 882 blocks!! She decided upon a simple box block and posted her request for the quilting community to help…and you know how generous the quilting community is!!!! As of today, she’s had to stop taking offers to make blocks but she is still in need of backing fabric and batting.

As soon as I saw her request I started pulling fabrics; 7 of the seniors are male and she asked that at least some of the blocks lean toward masculine colors. By the end of Wednesday evening I had already put together 22 blocks and I still had many more fabric combinations to go 😀

I finished the rest on Thursday evening and shipped a box off to Leanne on Friday with 42 blocks (enough to make one quilt) along with some remnants she can use for pieced backings. It feels so good to help out a worthy cause ❤

I guess all that piecing got me itching to start something new (ugh!) so I pulled out two Olive’s Flower Market charm packs that had been collecting dust on my shelf and opened up The Half-Square Triangle book from Jeni Baker. I decided upon “Triplicate” but took a few liberties with the pattern & design. Her pattern calls for 4″ squares and I didn’t want to cut down the charms so I started with 5″ squares. And of course that means my blocks turned out larger so I had to reduce my layout to 5 blocks across by 6 down…that will still give me a finished top measuring approx 65×78 – plenty big enough for me!

Once I had the block size figured out, I realized I didn’t have enough of any one fabric to use for the blocks and the background so I pulled all my white/low-volume/tone on tone fabrics and had just enough to make it work…whew!

Because I changed the size of the blocks and number of blocks, I had to play with the design as well. Here it all is up on my design wall…I’m not 100% sure I love it so nothing is sewn together yet.

I plan to spend the day in my sewing room doing some much needed quilting…here’s a sneak peak at the quilt I started working on for a friend. The meandering boxes take much more concentration than regular old meandering!

I hope you have a wonderful day and a Happy Easter 😀

**Edit 4/16 @ 8:30am

I can’t believe I completely forgot to mention that I went for a run yesterday! The first time in I can’t remember how long :-s  Yeah, it was rough and it was pretty darn short too!