SCRAP-tastic! Project Quilting 9.6

This week was the last challenge for Project Quilting Season 9 and the theme for the week was Scraptastic. Our quilts this week were to be made entirely of scraps and were to have at least 12 different fabrics.

I was visiting our oldest daughter and her family in North Dakota over the weekend when the last challenge winners were announced and traveling home when the new challenge came out. So I didn't get a chance to watch the winners video and check out what we were going to be doing this week until Monday morning!

I was very excited to see that my little mice from the last challenge were in the top 10 viewers choice  quilts.
Thank you to everyone that has voted for me this season :) I really appreciate your votes and all of your comments. This is the last challenge I will hound you for votes until next year!

On Monday I was still tired after a whirlwind weekend and over 800 miles of driving from here to there! When I left on Friday it was an ugly snowstorm, and the roads were starting to drift. I needed to drop something off at a friends house north of town so I knew I had to drive at least that far before I turned around and went home, but when I turned north the roads were better and by the time I crossed the Cheyenne River the snow had slowed and the roads were clear. So I kept going! By the time I crossed the ND border the sun was out & we drove in clear skies the rest of the way!

I  had gone up to watch our oldest grand-daughter skate in her annual figure skating program, and to help her create an Annie Oakley costume for her upcoming history class Living Wax Museum at school. I picked up a yard of flannel & some trim along the way north and with some creative ingenuity, a few more scraps from my daughters fabric stash, a cowboy hat and a pair of gloves we put together a pretty authentic Annie Oakley outfit! It was a good weekend & the weather cooperated until after I got home.

Monday was a crazy busy day, and I really didn't give the challenge a lot of thought. I knew I wanted to do something similar to the yellow challenge and sew strips of fabric together to create something. I thought about doing a birch tree quilt, but after doing nothing on Tuesday related to the challenge, I thought I better scale my idea down.

 I kept thinking about the 12 different fabric scraps we were to use, and I thought it would be fun to make something relating to the 12 months of the year. When we did the yellow challenge I kept thinking about candles, and I decided that I would do candles to represent the months of the year and then write family birthdays on each candle. On Wednesday while I was digging for scraps I came across some old taffeta, satin, velvet, and dress lining fabric that I had saved from the "Great Stash Purchase of 2010". For some unknown reason I thought this fabric would make great candles, maybe because it was shades of pink?

I love little pink striped birthday candles and these pinks, grays and ivory fabrics were just perfect...until I started sewing them. They frayed, they were stiff, the velvet kept crumbling, I almost SCRAPED the SCRAPS but since I had a vision and didn't want to dig for different fabric, I was determined to "make it work".

I found a fun piece of fabric left from a flower girls dress I had made a few years ago and decided that I would use that to make a cake for the candles. Then I took a scrap of ombre' fabric left from a baby quilt I made last year and cut strips to create the background for my candles. By this time I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to paint any names or dates on my satin & taffeta candles so I made my background long with the idea that I would paint the names above the candles.

I added flames to the candles using a scrap of yellow batik and then I set the whole thing aside until I could decide what I was going to do next!

Saturday morning I realized that the days might be longer but the week wasn't going to be, and if I was going to have something to enter this week I had better get it quilted. I had just taken a quilt off the longarm machine next door  and decided that quilting it that way was going to be faster than using my sewing machine and I would be able to write the names and dates in thread and I wouldn't have to mess with painting them on.

I dug through my stash and found a piece of fabric that had envelopes on it, which made me think of birthday cards and I used that for my backing fabric. I added an extra piece of batting to the birthday cake so that it would stand out more and then I started quilting! I had tension problems when I changed bobbins and had to pick out one name, then I only misspelled one of the months and put the wrong date on one birthday so I only had those 3 mistakes I had to redo. Which is a miracle since I really couldn't see what I was doing very well in the oranger parts of the fabric!

I quilted the candle flames, our family names, birth dates and the months of the year, in a bright orange thread, then quilted details on the candles in pink and a dark grey for the wicks. Then forgetting that the satin fabric was NOT fun to work with, I decided to bind the whole thing with a piece of pink satin & added a decorative stitch to hide the fact that it was a mess!

ugh....I should have tossed the whole pile of scraps away, but instead I tucked it into a drawer for the next time I decided I want to drive myself crazy trying to quilt with slinky fabric!

The finished quilt is 10 X 25 inches. I keep looking at it and just have to say...what was I thinking? LOL

It's 9:05 A Stitchin' Time

Wow! It's hard to believe we are already in the second week of March & that we are now almost done with the 5th challenge of Project Quilting Season 9. One challenge left to go before the season is over for the year. 

I have noticed a connection between the release of the challenges and stormy winter weather here in South Dakota and this challenge was no different. Our snow was almost gone & as soon as the challenge was announced the snows started again! LOL 

The weekend was our calm before the storm, so we fed the livestock extra rations, got the generators ready, picked up extra groceries, & I picked through my stash & moved some supplies down to the basement where I could work in warmth if the power went out. 

The challenge for the week was released at noon Sunday, "A Stitch In Time" but I wasn't in any big hurry to think about what I was going to do, I was counting on at least one blizzard day to stay home and work on it, maybe more if we had the 8-12 inches of snow predicted dumped on us! 

The first rule of the challenge was 1. Your project must literally or figuratively interpret the idiom "a stitch in time saves nine"

How better to start a challenge about a saying that some sources say is about procrastination than to actually procrastinate! I did spend some time on Sunday thinking about what I was going to do and researching to get some ideas, but not very enthusiastically. All I could think of was MICE, which made no sense & had nothing to do with procrastination or stitching anything.

I knew there was something I wasn't remembering about mice & sewing so I googled 
sewing mice & there it was! The Beatrix Potter story of the Tailor of Gloucester. For those of you who don't know the story, 

The Tailor of Gloucester is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter, privately printed by the author in 1902. The story is about a tailor whose work on a waistcoat is finished by the grateful mice he rescues from his cat and was based on a real world incident involving a tailor and his assistants.

A tailor in Gloucester sends his cat Simpkin to buy food and a twist of cherry-coloured silk to complete a waistcoat commissioned by the mayor for his wedding on Christmas morning. Whilst Simpkin is gone, the tailor finds mice the cat has imprisoned under teacups. The mice are released and scamper away. When Simpkin returns and finds his mice gone, he hides the twist in anger.

The tailor falls ill and is unable to complete the waistcoat, but, upon returning to his shop, he is surprised to find the waistcoat finished. The work has been done by the grateful mice. However, one buttonhole remains unfinished because there was "no more twist!" Simpkin gives the tailor the twist to complete the work and the success of the waistcoat makes the tailor's fortune.

So MICE it was going to be! But this was going to be a different story....

Remember every fall when we would head back to school & our teachers would ask us to write an essay about "What I did on my summer vacation"? 

Well this past year my summer vacation consisted of rescuing wild barn kittens, 16 of them to be exact. Rescuing them from the evil jaws of a little killing machine named Cookie. Poor Cookie, she doesn't know any better because her father was a Jack Russell & killing things is in her blood. She kills muskrats, raccoons, rabbits, snakes, prairie dogs, pheasants, last winter she tried to kill a buck deer, she sometimes forgets her mother was a corgi so even though her fighting spirit is very large, her legs are very short! 

After finding too many murdered kittens over the past few years, I decided this year I wasn't going to stand for it, we love Cookie too much to get rid of her, spankings don't work & she isn't going to change her evil ways. But I knew if I could find the kittens when they were small enough I could save them & give them away or at least grow them big enough to defend themselves! 

So that is what we did, the grand kids & I crawled through hay bales & hunted cats all summer long, we were able to capture a couple batches, move them to the porch & tamed them down enough to give them all away. But the old black momma cat had her kittens high up in the hay & she kept them there. We wanted those kittens, they were so beautiful! 5 little black tuxedo cats, with strange markings & inquisitive personalities. They looked like little scarecrows, or a straight flush in a poker hand.

We finally were able to catch one & moved him to the quilt shop, where we named him Squidward & got so attached to him, he is still there. The other 4 have now grown enough to defend themselves against the dogs & hold court on the quilt shop deck. So instead of 4 barn cats we now have 9 but one of them is .5 of the time a house cat LOL 

Squid & his cousin Shadow

Squidward 

So back to Project Quilting 9.5! I started thinking about those cats, and what hunters they are, we very seldom see mice & in the past have been overrun by cottontails, but not anymore, we have 9 very capable mouse hunters who some days we will see hunting way out on the prairie for birds and voles.

Then I thought about all those poor little mice who have to hide for their lives from the evil barn cats & I decided I would do my quilt story about them. So I painted 9 little mice, sewing little cat masks that they could wear when they had to venture out of their nests & trick the cats into thinking they were  just another one of the many barn cats! 

There is just something about little creatures doing people things, that I love, my favorite books growing up were "The Wind in the Willows",  "The Chronicles of Narnia" & all the Beatrix Potter books. I don't know if it was the actual stories I loved or the images of the little creatures dressed in people clothes, brandishing swords & going on adventures! 

                        My favorite mouse is the one brandishing the needle!

I didn't add clothes to my mice because I wanted the masks to be the subject of the story, I always think of Mardi Gras when I think of masks so I added little green sequins and black beads to the eyes on the masks.

I also added a teacup to reference the story of the "Tailor of Gloucester" since I had taken the sewing mice idea from that story. I also added a clock & set the time at 9:05 to represent the number of the challenge.

Then of course last but not least, I added an evil green eyed tuxedo cat peeking 

through a knot hole while the mice frantically sew their masks! 

 I thought I had a piece of mouse fabric in my stash that I wanted to use on the border of the quilt, but while I was digging for it, I found this fun green piece that I thought looked like the cat eyes. So when I quilted it I sort of haphazardly quilted the shape of eyes. The finished quilt is 19 X 13.

Since we didn't have school & it was a raging blizzard outside, I had no where else to go but to the couch in front of the fire & the TV so I spent all day Monday painting my little project.  On Tuesday evening I added my borders, quilted & added the binding. I couldn't believe I had the entire project done by Tuesday night, and if I hadn't procrastinated :) on Sunday I would have actually had it all done on Monday night!
We have one more challenge after this one. I hope the weather patterns change & we have nothing but warm days & spring rains from now on! We start calving the week the next challenge goes up & we don't need a raging blizzard or baby calves in the basement! 

 

As for all those crazy barn cats, I am going to capture them one by one & they are going to go to the vet to get fixed. Although we loved every minute of it, & there is nothing sweeter than watching kids play with kittens, I am done with kitten adventures for a few years!