On Ringo Lake week 5 Link-up

I am sneaking this link-up post in at the last minute. You can find the link-up for this week's clue at Quiltville. I had fun with the flying geese this week, but it was Christmas, after all. So they are not all done, about 70 percent maybe. I played with all the patches so far and came up with this as a possible arrangement:

 I'm guessing tomorrow's clue will include some neutral triangles to match clue 4, and maybe the final reveal. I'm sure we're pretty close!

 My ironing board needs to have the mouse ears removed after I clip the units apart.

A lot of mouse ears fall off at the machine, too.

This week's collage: I snuck in a snow-selfie, Quarta singing Hamilton tunes, and a Christmas pie, but they are kind of in the general color scheme. We had snow on Christmas eve, and the lessons and carols service was canceled. But it was a nice night to stay in.

Merry Christmas, and happy stitching to all of you!

Randomday in Black and White

My cousin Scott challenged me to one of those Facebook thingies, where you post a black/white photo of "everyday life" every day for seven days. I don't usually take anything other than snapshots, but this was actually fun. Maybe changing a color photo to black and white makes it artsy. It's kind of a telegraphic version of my week.

 Go to church on Sunday

 Sew patches on a soldier's uniform on Monday

 STAR WARS on Tuesday

Turkey on Wednesday -- just because

 Kitty on Thursday

 Christmas tree on Friday

Bake Christmas pies on Saturday

I'll let that be it for Randomday. Have a very Merry Christmas, and God bless us, every one!

On Ringo Lake - Part 4

Once again I'm linking up to the Quiltville mystery, On Ringo Lake. This week was clue 4. You can see what everyone else has been doing here.

I made a collage of pictures I took in the last week. I'm still only about half done with clue 4, which isn't bad considering I have both boys back home for the holidays and we've been doing a lot of nice family things. Like steak and turkey dinners, Quarta's school dance, and going to see Star Wars. Also my cousin challenged me to that Facebook thing where you take black/white photos of ordinary life for 7 days. It's hard to focus on the sewing, but this clue is kind of a fun one. It's nice to work with the browns and blues again. I wonder where it's all going?

I like a LOT of variety in my scrappy quilts! No problem with the blues, but I have a somewhat more limited selection of dark browns. Still, I don't think there will be too much repetition. I also notice that if I have a "signature" fabric, it's plaids. They are in every quilt I make. Must be my Scottish ancestry.

On Ringo Lake - Part 3 Link-up

On Ringo Lake is on clue #3, and here is a collage of what I've been working on since that clue came out Friday. You can find many more at the link-up at Quiltville. I've been taking more sunrise pictures as I walk Tertia to school in the cold mornings, because we've been working with sunrise colors. And there really aren't any ugly sunrise colors! My camera is not really capable of picking up all the reds, pinks and oranges, unfortunately. Sunrise in these northern latitudes was 7:43 this morning, and the temperature was 24. Brr! And sunset will be at 4:26.  But the tradeoff with the cold temps is that we are having nice clear weather and no rain.

 So the clue is to make umpty-hundred of these mirror-image parallelograms, but first you have to cut umpty rectangles and 2(umpty) triangles (or squares that will be trimmed down).

 I haven't really been cleaning up my area as I go, but after I cut I did have to roll up my strips and squeeze them back into their bin. There is not a lot of room to work on my cutting or sewing surface. I need to work on taming the mess... but it's not terribly realistic right now!

 I thought at first I'd need to buy the "easy folded corners ruler" if I didn't want to use squares instead of triangles and waste more fabric. But it turns out my Fons and Porter flying geese ruler, which I also used for the last clue, can also be used to trim the coral rectangles down. It worked quite well and gives the final measurement that you need in the clue.

 Here are some of my pieces in process. I used an even wider variety of corals, pinks, peaches and some oranges than I did in last week's clue. Like I say, there are no ugly sunrise colors!

 These long strings of units are what you get when you do a bunch of one-way slanting parallelograms at the same time. Kind of looks like strands of DNA. And my arrangement of them with previous clues kind of looks like a space invader:

It's a lengthy process. I'm still at about half-umpty, but I only have about .25 umpty rectangles to trim. And I like the process, the variety, everything. At least 80% of my fabrics are from my stash, not the ones purchased for this mystery, and I think the average vintage of my stash is about 2001. Some fabrics are much older

On Ringo Lake - Part 2 Link-up

On Ringo Lake mystery quilt continues, with a Link-up over at Quiltville. This week it's all about the geese, in sunrise colors. What is the difference between coral and melon, anyway? I think coral is an orangish pink, and melon is a pinkish orange, but I could be wrong about that. Add in salmon and I'm really confused... but I love peach. I just pulled down the pink and orange fabric bins and found at least 36 different fabrics. I even pulled some from the Connecting Threads "Whirlwind Romance" collection I have in the "blush" colorway. I stayed away from bright orange (that was Celtic Solstice) and magenta/fuchsia pink (that was my quandary last year with En Provence!) but I did include some fabrics from the 80's and 90's that one could probably call "mauve." Remember mauve? It was such a hot color, back in the day! Used as a neutral, just about everywhere. I miss my oversized mauve sweater!

Once again I made a collage of some of my process pictures this week. Okay, that's the sunrise this morning on top, but we are working with sunrise colors. And on the bottom are two pictures from Tertia's choir concert last night, before I gave up on getting her paying attention. On top left is when I was cutting the geese, and I noticed that my blueberry kombucha was in the color range I was working with. Bonnie used this one in her collage for the link-up -- I'm honored!

In the middle is my silliness for the week. I grew up in Ohio and the OSU marching band still does "Script Ohio" every game, with the tuba dotting the i at the last minute. It's one of my earliest childhood memories, and so when I saw a video of it shared on Facebook, I ended up playing with my geese and taking a panorama photo instead of finishing all the geese. I still have about 20% of them to go. I'm enjoying the process a lot. It is so much fun to push the variety of fabrics. I could probably make another quilt in a different colorway, and still not make a big dent in my stash. I was thinking about the big trees silhouetted against the sunrise here in the Northwest, and maybe dark green would look great with the sunrise colors. Anyway, I still need to finish this week's clue. Thanks to all who stop by.