Can You Stand Another....

fall/Halloween quilt?? It seems I never run out!
I purchased these hand-silkscreened blocks from a vendor at Pacific International Quilt Festival some years ago. I thought they were such cute folk art. (I actually bought lots more pieces, but haven't used most of them yet!) I put them with some pumpkin fabric that I really like. It's just big enough to fit a skinny piece of wall, which I just happen to have!
A closeup so you can really appreciate the detail in these little blocks.

I haven't been doing too much this week. I over-did on some hand work (quilting and applique) last weekend and am now suffering with a tendonitis flareup in my hands. Aside from the discomfort, it's just a pain to not be able to do much. I can type a little, and do the rotary cutter and sewing machine, but not iron or cut with scissors. So, I've sorted some fabrics and generally made a mess in the quilt studio. I did finally find an embroidery hoop! I have somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen hoops, and couldn't find a single one. But I finally found one in another project! Yay! Now, when my hands feel better, I can finish the block that I needed the hoop for.

I started quilting another Halloween wallhanging. (The "Boo!" quilt, Pam!) I've gotten the center done, but now I'm kind of stuck on what to do on the border, especially since my hands aren't really cooperating. The border is solid black, so any quilting will really show up well. So, both the quilt and my hands are resting whilst I cogitate on it. I may end up not doing free-motion and just doing simple lines with the walking foot. That should be easier on my hands. But boring, probably.

Our weather has turned quite fall-like this week. We've been cold at night - last night our low was 32 degrees! And the high isn't much above the 50 degree mark. Seems like we turned cold pretty quickly this fall. We're starting to get some good color on the trees, but have another week or more before it peaks. But just beautiful sunny weather yesterday and today. Yay for sun! And, just so you know, I really didn't expect to ever hear myself say that. I got over-done on sunshine in California. No problem with that here in Washington!

Just to show you that I'm not totally obsessing with fall quilts, here's one that doesn't even come close to fall.


This was a color challenge in which we blindly drew paint chips out of a paper bag to determine the colors we had to work with. I drew two colors pretty close to each other. At first it was hard to find the colors I needed, but after going to a couple of quilt shows (and the multiple vendors at each one), I was OK on fabrics. (Shopping for quilting somehow has never been a hardship, except maybe on the checkbook!)
I can't remember if I paper-pieced this one or not. It was a hard one to do as far as figuring out what I needed to do on each block, for color placement. I got easily confused on this one! I had a lot of false starts on these blocks. I also wasn't thrilled with the white background, but it seemed to work the best with these colors.
So, I added the buttons to the corners to kind of jazz it up a little. That was fun to do, figuring out all the different ways you could sew on a button!

I had a hard time deciding how to quilt this one. I ended up doing minimal quilting on it. It's just a little wallhanging, about the size of a placemat, so that's not a big deal. But I was quite pleased with how the border quilting worked. The first time I had tried that, and it came out better than I thought it would. Can't complain about that, can I?

I had so much fun with this challenge that I actually made 2 quilts! And my DD made one too. I think it was only her 2nd or 3rd quilt. Someday I'll show you my other quilt, and maybe DD will let me show hers too.