Postcards, Seeds, Spiders, Color Study

 

No quilting happened today, instead I used my energy up writing a whole lot of Postcards to Voters and actually getting them into the mail. I had planned and ahead and last week I bought a new roll of fall leafy postcard stamps and blank postcards with a printed message on one side that says: 

BE A VOTER 

Your Voice Matters  

🌟---Really---🌟

My goal is to write and send out all 100 postcards for the upcoming mid-term election.

I also harvested some Day Lily seeds from my garden that I'm going to attempt to sprout and grow. Usually you buy them as small bare roots with crowns. I was pulling out the dry flower stalks with the dried pods and heard the seeds rattling. I looked it up right then and there on my phone to see if the seeds were worth planting or not before I tossed the stalks into the composter. It sounded to me like it's definitely worth a try. The more Day Lilies the better, right? I'll be sure and report back here in spring to let you know if it worked or not.

We also have finished off our Halloween decorating. I really liked how this picture turned out. One of our couch-side lamps temporarily has a purple LED bulb, and the other one has a red bulb. Both have BIG hairy spiders, and it's rather SpoOoOooky just as intended.

Oh, and I signed myself up for another Alison Glass quilt along, Color Study. I think it's a really interesting looking quilt.

Spinning Wheel or Pinwheel or Flying Kite

 

Time for me to make the very last BAMQ BOM block. This one has a lot of names:  Flying Kite or Spinning Wheel or Pinwheel. It's a lot of triangles and a strip with a 45° angle on one end. 

I will be honest, I had a hard time laying it out, maybe if I'd used all different fabric for the "blades" it would have been easier for me?

I'm liking how it's looking at this point, and I'm also glad that I chose to make the 12" version.

There it is, all done! Now to start figuring out a good layout for all the blocks I've made so far.

Stars+Alternates

Here's the whole stack of to-be-sewn together "twenty alternate blocks" for the Lupine Mystery quilt.And here's the final block assembled right after ironing.

Well, here they all are together, the Lupine Stars and the "alternate blocks". This us not an intentional arrangement, I just slapped them up as they were pressed.

woohoooooo.

Now to play around with the arrangement until I like what I see.

All The Stars

 

The last five Lupine Stars are now done.

Here's one of my favorites.

And another one.

Twenty-five Lupine Stars all together. This would make a nice quilt, I like that secondary pattern a lot.

I pushed myself and made five of the "alternate blocks", to add to the one I'd done before, just to see how it would change....And wow! What a difference that alternate block makes in the took of the quilt. Twenty more of those to assemble. This is going to be fun to play around with the final layout.

Ten More Lupine Stars

 

Ten more Lupine Stars are done and up on the wall.

They're hanging out with the first ten that I made and the one lonely "alternate" block.

Only five more to assemble!

Alternate Lupine Block

I had all the ingredients out, so I made one of the "alternate" blocks (ie not a Lupine Star) for the Lupine Mystery quilt. Just to see how one of them looked. I like it a lot, it's very different than the star block.

 Here's how it will look with all the Lupine Stars. It's a very cool secondary pattern. 

I even went through the Ohio Stars and the Kitty Ears and HSTs to match them up so that none of the fabrics are repeated in each block. And to make sure the colors and prints worked together in each block. It's quite a stack, isn't it?

Now they're all ready to sew once I'm done with the Lupine Stars which are also all laid out. Okay, back to all the block assembly sewing left to do.

Final Lupine Border

 The joined-up Flying Geese are now further joined together into the four final borders for the Lupine Mystery quilt. It took a lot of counting to make sure I had the correct number sewn together. 

I think it'll be a really nice-looking final border, especially once I make the four corner blocks. It's kind of funny to have the final border done before I've gotten the main part of the quilt put together.