Of Kittens and Crumbs

Check out this little guy... isn't he cute? A little camera shy though. I couldn't catch a picture of him actually looking at the camera.

We found him and his brothers and sisters out behind the pallet stacks at work. His name is Loki and he's been adopted by one of my coworkers. He has at least three other siblings that we are attempting to catch. Living in the brush behind a chemical plant is not a healthy place for kittens to grow up. We have no idea where Mommy Cat is, no one has seen her.

I've been chugging away at quilting Nana's Quilt. Its a little rough because I want to turn corners and that is a bit unwieldy with a walking foot. It is about half done now and I may switch to the FMQ foot to see if I have an easier time with that.

Last night I couldn't sleep until about 2:30 in the morning, so at around 1 am I gave up and wandered into my sewing room for a little sewing therapy. What is easy to not mess up at 1 am when you are tired but can't sleep? Crumb blocks! A seven inch square crumb block can be safely cut into a 6.5 inch hexagon.

The crumb blocks are coming along nicely. I have 3 hexagons (one not pictured) and 5 triangles so far. I'm playing with the idea of making a small quilt that has a row of each in it and a row of crumb squares on a white background.

Last but not least, I hit a wall with my paper pieced stars. I'm not sure I like how the block is turning out, so I may change it up. This is the original color scheme:

And these are the other fabrics I auditioned.

Or I suppose I could make every segment different! But part of the appeal of these stars in the kaleidoscope effect. Oh, decisions, decisions.

Crumb Blocks!

Working on these paper piecing stars is accelerating the collection in my scrap bin to overflowing. The current star is Alaska and I have three sections put together. This block takes 104 pieces total.

I decided to do something about my overflowing scrap box and started working on crumb blocks. Any pieces I can't get cut into a X.5-inch increment square are candidates for the crumb blocks. Basically, you just stitch the pieces of fabric together any old way and you make usable blocks out of scraps.

Which is cute and looks like a wonky log cabin. It needed something.

Turns out what it needed was a 60-degree triangle cut.

Add a little sashing:

And voila! We have the makings of a scrappy quilt top.