Finished Blocks + Pillow

I did it! I achieved my goal of finishing the rest of my scrappy trip blocks yesterday! I was super tired by the end of it, though. Mostly because I decided to do Insanity (again- I did it once last summer) and as this is my first week, I am SO SORE. But! I can still keep up and even do almost as many push-ups as the super fit people in the videos, so I'm pretty please with myself :) But that made for really sore arms during my sewing fest. My obsession was such that I gritted my teeth through the pain and now I have 36 pretty, scrappy blocks. Please excuse the crappy phone picture. I didn't remember to get out my nice camera while I had the blocks all laid out... and I really don't want to move the furniture and do it again!

I can't wait to get it all sewn together! Then I just have to put together some sort of backing and quilt! Question: if you were me, what color thread would you use for quilting? I feel like white would stick out too much, but there are so many colors, I just can't decide. There is more blue than anything else, probably, so I was thinking maybe a lighter blue. Or light grey, maybe? Hmmm. Help??

Also! In between the scrappy madness, I managed to finish another Sister's Ten pillow:

For this one, I just did straight line quilting. I couldn't decide what else to do and I didn't want the quilting to distract too much from the block itself, which I am really quite fond of. I love it so much! I need to redecorate my living room to match my new pillows, I think.

Linking up to Finish it Up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts!

WiP Wednesday: Scrappy Edition

I have become obsessed. All I have done since my last post is make scrappy trip blocks... Well, and eat, sleep, and spend time with my boyfriend and dogs. And volunteer at the Poetry Center. But all my other time has been spent on this:

Please excuse the huge wire mess... that's what happens when a puppy trips on an errant wire and tangles them ALL up.

This is my scrappy trip quilt at 22 blocks. I am now at 30! I made... 7... of those today. See? I told you I was obsessed! I just need 6 more and I can start putting them together! I really want to try to get those done tomorrow. Then I can spend the weekend putting the top together and cobbling together a backing and then! Next week can be spent quilting! I am SO EXCITED about this quilt. I plan on laying them all out and snapping a couple of photos when I get them all done. I might be lazy and do this with my phone. Follow me on Instagram (@crookedbanana) if you wanna see!

So that's been my week. I haven't really responded to e-mails (sorry!) or spent much time interacting with the outside world at all unless I had a prior commitment. I have a problem. I will rejoin the land of the people shortly, I promise! And hopefully have new projects to show you in the next couple of weeks :)

Linking up to WiP Wednesday with Lee at Freshly Pieced!

A Little Break...

I took a little break from the scrappy trip madness today to make this:

I turned one of my Sister's Ten BOM blocks into a pretty little pillow :) I decided to try a loopy FMQ pattern on this one. It's a bit inconsistent as far as spacing goes. But that's what practice is for, right? I really love how it turned out! I had put these blocks away because I could decide what color to use as borders for the pillows... I thought I would use a neutral, but I didn't like any of the ones I held up to the block, so into a bin they went to wait. Then today I decided I needed a little break from scrappy tripping- I'm up to 11 blocks! And now I need to cut more strips. Which I really didn't feel like doing. It was quite by chance that I settled on this green for the borders. It was laying on my cutting table waiting to have a strip cut from it for my scrappy trip and they just looked so perfect together! I cut a couple more strips and a little while later I had a pretty finished pillow. The back is a simple envelop closure in the same green as the border. The other block is waiting to be quilted and will join its sister as a pillow hopefully this weekend. Yay!

I also finished my bee block for the month.

Isn't it pretty? I don't think I would have picked these colors, but I really love how it looks now that it's all together! It will be making its way to Virginia tomorrow morning :)

Okay. So I didn't achieve my goal for the week, which was to knock out all my BOM blocks. My scrappy trip quilt is still totally distracting me... and covering my sewing table! There is a fabric explosion in here and I really don't feel like cleaning it up to make a couple of blocks and then have to get it all out again. So I'm probably going to fall behind in the BOM department. But for my scrappy trip quilt... that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make!

Now I can't decide if I should finish my pillow this afternoon or make a few more scrappy trip blocks... Decisions.

Linking up to Finish it Up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts!

A New WiP or A Trip Down the Rabbit Hole

I did it. I drank the kool aid. I just couldn't resist any longer.

That's right. I started a scrappy trip quilt! I kept telling myself I didn't have enough scraps or it would be too tedious and the blocks I did manage to make would end up languishing in a bin somewhere.. But you know what? I'm glad I gave it a shot. Because I am already in love :) What really pushed me over the edge was Couch's scrappy trip beginnings. Because she's a noob like me and since she just decided to go for it I thought, well why not? I can cut strips from fat quarters since I don't have many 2.5" scraps. I can make it work! So I am. Making it work. I couldn't be more pleased. Just 33 more blocks to go to get to the size I want! WOO! My goal is to finish this quilt before I start work, which gives me almost 4 weeks. I CAN DO THIS.

Back to work now! WEEEE!

Linking up to WiP Wednesday with Lee at Freshly Pieced!

Vegas + Driving + Clothes

Yes, finally, I have returned.

I didn't really go anywhere, mind you, but I did have a silent blogging weekend. But it was definitely not an idle weekend! I have been sewing up a storm the past week since I returned from my little vacation and now I'll show you what I was doing! Well. After a couple of other pictures of fun times :)

First, a photo of the kind of weather we faced on our drive up to Las Vegas. Ridiculous, no? I'm glad Mario was driving through the worst of it! It was such an unfortunate weather weekend. I live in the southwest... I should be able to plan a vacation and expect sun pretty much anytime that isn't monsoon season. But of course, this is what happens when I finally take a vacation. The little black thing in the bottom of the picture is a headlight, by the way. I drive a mid nineties Mazda Miata. It has pop-up headlights and is totally adorable :)

This was our ridiculous hotel. The Luxor. We stayed in a pyramid room with sloped windows and pyramid shaped hand soap.

View from outside our hotel room door!

At Gordon Ramsay's Burgr. Just the ladies of the group because this is the picture that turned out best :) I missed these girls!

Most of the rest of my pictures are of silly things that I won't bore you with ;) I didn't take many tourist-y pictures because half the time I forgot I even had my camera on me. I was much more excited to be seeing my old friends than I was about Vegas, anyway!

Speaking of spending time with friends, we also took a trip up Mt. Lemmon last weekend with the Volvo crew. Yeah, there's a crew.

These are the cars that came up the mountain with us! We invited more people, but for various reasons they couldn't make it. Still! It was a ton of fun.

Here's Mario and I at the top of the mountain! See the snow in the background?? It was over 90 degrees in Tucson that day. But at the top of Mt. Lemmon there was still snow! Exciting! We're leaning on the green Volvo :)

Our friend, Beau, got some really fancy pictures and videos on the way down. I don't recommend doing this, though! It looks rather terrifying to me. But he's crazy. Anything for a good car picture!

Whew! Okay. So those are some of the fun things I've been doing lately. Well, the fun non-sewing things. I have also been making more clothes! Look!

Three skirts and a dress! I made the first two from scratch. The top one was my first time shirring anything and I am pleased to say it was pretty easy. And it fit when it was finished and didn't fall apart! The second one is a (very wrinkled from wear) pleated wrap skirt. I loosely based it on this tutorial found via Pinterest. I didn't have enough fabric left after making the dress to follow the pattern exactly and still have it wrap around me, so I made the pleats much smaller. I think it still turned out pretty cute! I wore it all day (hence the wrinkles!) and got a lot of compliments :)

The last two were refashions of clothes I was planning to donate or throw away (for the really worn out items). I stumbled across the blog Refashionista, written by a lovely lady named Jillian Owens and after reading about 200 posts, I became a little obsessed. I immediately starting digging through my donation clothes to see what I could come up with. The pink and brown skirt used to be a shirred tube dress, much like the one I made. But I LOVED that dress and wore it to death. The elastic was just dying and the top was starting to unravel... But I thought maybe the bottom was still salvageable so I cut it off and added an elastic waist band and voila! My adorable dress is now and adorable skirt! With pockets!! The last one actually used to be a t-shirt that was sadly way too big for me after I lost some weight. The material was pretty heavy for a t-shirt, so I thought it would make a cute, comfy, casual skirt. again, I just cut the top off right under the sleeves and added an elastic waist band (I need to buy more elastic now...). It's so comfortable! And purple! I love how it turned out :) 

I will definitely be doing more refashioning. I think each of these skirts took me about 30 minutes (maybe) and the results were so cute! Plus, I was able to give new life to clothes I still loved but couldn't wear anymore. Jillian's blog is so much fun and so inspiring. I definitely have a new awareness of the clothes I own and I think after spending so much time reading her blog I will take to my next shopping trip with heightened awareness of the spending choices I make. If you have any interest in making cute clothes from thrift store purchases, you should definitely check out her blog! 

Did you make it to the end? WOW. Good for you :) Don't worry, I haven't abandoned quilting. I just needed a little break after Mr. Hounds Tooth. I'm working on Bee and BOM blocks this week- my goal is to have them all done by Friday. Wish me luck! First up is my March block for the Newbee Quilters Bee, a Sawtooth star in red, blue, and gray. Better get back to work!

Linking up to Let's Get Acquainted, hosted by Jamie Lee at Busy Bee Quilts this week!