Today is the last day of May 2024. I tend to think of May 31st as Memorial Day, not just the last Monday in May. Memorial Day was always the day the town beach opened when I lived on the other coast. So exciting to get all the beach things together and walk down the street with chairs and umbrellas in tow. Claiming your spot on the sand and daring each other to go into the water, too cold usually. Fond memories of sandy baloney and mayonnaise sandwiches, sunburned shoulders and the scent of cocoa butter.

Today I am going to start a different memory trail, for someone else. I have a bag full of baby clothes and little girls dresses to use. It is going to be fun, I keep telling myself, yesterday I came up with a plan/pattern. That was bugging me, that I didn’t have a plan, I wasn’t going to fall into the puzzling together pattern. I had thought of doing the potato chip quilt pattern, but when I showed the client, they encouraged me to make the pieces bigger. The “chips” are rectangular 2″ x 3″, but that scrap quilt will have to wait for another day. I decided on 10″ squares made up of smaller pieces, 4″ squares being the smallest. I recently made a quilt, I’ve been calling it Sage baby quilt, and it is a random pattern of such blocks. What I need to do this weekend is get the clothes organized and see what needs SF101 stabilizer applied and get cutting pieces.

A few days ago I came across this blog post from Krista Moser at The Quilted Life called Just Four Fat Quarters. I had four FQs plus a few scraps left over from the Sage baby quilt, so I was able to make a cute top, quickly. I added borders and voila! all the scraps from the original two 4-FQ packs are gone. I am looking forward to making another of KM’s quilts called Fall Foliage. I recently found some ombre fabrics that I hope will work for leaves and a sky blue grunge type for the background. Also purchased this week, a few more Cotton and steel fabric for the clamshell quilt top. The color way of those fabrics is a bit different from the ones that Moda, Riley Blake and most of the other big fabric houses use. I keep trying to get to the bottom of that box of scraps, but end up adding to them. This box started out as a bargain fat quarter pack, rabbit hole.

The treehouse is being built, board by board. The Good morning blanket is being knit row by row. I just got into section E, lavenders and purples. There are nine sections, so I am about half way through now. On the long arm this week is a client quilt, a Christmas jelly roll strip quilt. This client really likes to iron and this top it so well pressed and pieced it is like quilting a whole cloth top. After this is done I’ll get the two Halloween tops on and hopefully have them done when I get a chance to do a photo session next month-ish.

Speaking of Sage baby quilt, it has been quilted and bound. It joins a pile of finished quilts for this week. Yesterday I bound the last quilt, Morning Flower of the pile from last week’s picture of quilted tops. Funny how things you are procrastinating doing get pushed to the front of the to-do list when other projects are behind them in the line up. I would like to get these quilts photographed and on the shop site. But that may not happen until next week, I have too much going on this week to spend a day snapping, editing and posting.

This morning I am planning on washing some windows, as I think the rains are done for this year. I turned on the garden drip system so the summer has begun here.

Be Kind.