Tiny Blocks, and other favorite things

I have had many unfinished Tiny Blocks left from the story boards I create to teach the process of making the blocks at my "Sew Small" guild. I decided it was finally time to get them sewn together. The photo below shows all of the blocks I have put together in the last few days. All of them had already been somewhere in the assembly process and on a story board I have used in the last couple of months.

 The 2 1/2" ruler and the rotary cutter help give you size perspective. Believe me when I say that even when I have them already cut and partially assembled, these do not go together quickly. And the one in the upper lefthand corner went together incorrectly. It is supposed to look just like the orange one below it. By the time I realized it was wrong, I was not prepared to pick it apart and start over. I just call it a new and very awkward design. :)

You can see that some of these blocks have a white background (which is not a batik), and others have a creamier colored background (which is a batik). As I finish these blocks I place them on different boards, according to whether they have the white background, or a batik background. Below are the white background blocks.

It is a little harder to get a nice, flat press with the white background, which is probably a Kona White. 

I started making these blocks about 3 years ago when Village Dry Goods sponsored The Tiny Club, taught by the mastermind behind these mini creations, Lynn Hopkins. At first I was making them out of reproduction prints, and I was using scraps from my cutting table, and leftover HSTs cut down to size. These are the blocks I made while a part of that club.

The teeny star in the center was one I cut with the wrong template and made too small, but I like it. This is as far as I got before the club ended, when Lynn went on an 18 month mission.

When I joined the Sew Small guild shortly before Lynn left on his mission, he was a member of the guild and had been teaching the blocks to them. I was asked to step in and teach while he was gone, and that is how I ended up doing this. I switched to batiks when I started teaching, knowing they would give a crisper example, but I started out pairing it with the white fabric, because I didn't have good backgrounds among my batik stash.

Once I found some good backgrounds in batiks, I have pretty much been using them exclusively, and below you see all of the blocks made completely from batiks.

Altogether I have over 60 completed blocks, but due to the different fabric types, they won't all end up in the same project. I am still playing with different ideas in my head as to what to do with them. I have two more months of teaching, which means I will be adding a few more blocks to the pile. And if you like random facts, 52 is the largest number of pieces so far in one of these 2" finished blocks!

The only other quilting I have done this month has been working on the binding for my Rocky Mountain Christmas quilt. I had waffled back and forth on what to use for the binding. Everything on the front so far had been from men's thrift store shirts, and I didn't want that to change, but I also didn't want the binding to be too terribly scrappy. There is already a lot of that going on in this quilt.

I dug through my shirt stash and finally came up with two that I thought would play nicely together. If you look closely at the photo you may be able to see where one shirt ended and another began. Only one of the two shirts was actually used in the quilt, but you'd have a hard time believing the other one wasn't in it as well.

A favorite wintertime activity is assembling puzzles. For my birthday last fall I was gifted this puzzle, and I finally had a chance to put it up this month. It was a fun one to do.

I received another similar (but different) puzzle for Christmas, but I think next I am slipping in a recent gift of a puzzle about the state of Maine. The giver knew I have enjoyed several visits there, most recently just last September.

Another favorite thing is my winter garden on my kitchen window sills. (you can click on this to get an enlarged view)

These orchids usually bloom from around December until late into the Spring, and often I am enjoying this riot of color while outside it looks like this...

If you enlarge this photo, what looks like speckles in the photo are the big, fat clumps of flakes that were falling from the sky.

And this is the same view a few days later, zoomed in a little, as the almost full moon rose this month. In the photo above, you cannot even tell there are mountains in the background, as the snow was coming down so heavily.

I hope you are doing well, wherever you live, whether it is winter or summer or somewhere in between. And I hope that you are finding time for the things that sooth your soul in these times of so much chaos. I have actually found, since picking up my violin again last fall, that it is very beneficial to my spirit to express my feelings through the music. And it doesn't take as long to play a few songs as it does to finish a quilt! ;)

I am pleased that I actually got a second post in during February (but only because February had an extra day). My hope is that in March I get more done than tiny blocks and binding!

Until then,

Be creative, and be kind.

Janet O.

One last photo looking out from the front deck. Can you see the bird up in the treetop? I believe it is a hawk.

These are the eastern mountains, and the color on them is the reflection of the sunset in the west. (In order to get the photo without the power lines, I would have had to run downstairs and outside. But I was afraid the hawk would be gone by the time I did that.)