Purple Passion

Good Morning Friends!

 It's Scrap Happy Saturday and August is PURPLE month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge 2020. I chose purple as the one consistent color in the Magic Stars quilt. Every block is half purple, and every block has a different purple fabric. Perfect for making scraps or leftovers for scrappy purple August.  This pile is left over after cutting out blocks for two quilts. 

Suzette is trying to get my attention here. She just woke up from her nap and wants to eat, and she thinks she needs me to stand next to her while she does. Sometimes I humor her with that, but I know if she is really hungry she will manage to eat without me being near. We had another female kitty years ago who did the same thing, always preferred that I stood by while she ate. My male cats have never done that. Your cats?

There was enough fabric leftover from my large Magic Stars quilt to make a smaller version of the same quilt. So earlier this week when I had completed the blocks for the large quilt and finalized the layout, I took some time to cut fabric from the leftover chunks for the small quilt. Even though I made some changes in the fabrics, purple remains the consistent color in half of each block. As I cut I kept fabric pairs together and when I had all the fabric cut for each block I clipped them together with little binder clips and stacked them in a box of their own. That's made it so simple to pull everything I need for one full block (each final block is made of four small blocks) to add it to my leader/ender box next to my machine.  

More information on the Magic Stars quilt is available in previous posts. If you are interested in a tutorial check the Magic Stars label on my sidebar it should take you to the previous posts where there are links to follow.

Today I'm continuing to sew little Magic Star blocks, in leader/ender fashion as I finish the final seams on my large Magic Star quilt.  Once it's done I need to make a few Face Masks. I will choose some purple fabric for at least one of those.

These little blocks are in various stages of completion. When I have the side strips sewn onto two or three block sets I take a few minutes to trim them up and slice them diagonally. Then the diagonal pieces go back into the leader/ender box next to my machine. 

Once I have three or four blocks worth of those pieces sewn together I'm pulling them out, trimming them down to size and putting them in a separate box to await their turn on the design board. 

I've made myself a note about trimming, because if this continues as a leader/ender project it's going to take some time and I'm prone to forgetting just how I decided to do the trimming.  I'm storing the note and the ruler I'm using to do the trimming right in the box with the trimmed blocks. 

Boxes for the different parts of this project are sitting on the bottom shelf of my sewing desk.  So everything I need is perfectly handy when I need it. 

Just 3 more seams to go and I will have the large quilt top finished, unless I decide to add a border.  Here are the first two rows sewn together laying on the pressing table. 

That is a mirror image you see in the  background, not a second large quilt. 

The next two rows are on the cutting table in the midst of getting pinned. I was not careful to be as accurate as possible in pinning the first two rows and it shows. But I'm not ripping out that long seam. I am being much more careful this time and hope my points will match up better. 

Getting points and intersections to line up has been a challenge in this quilt. I didn't stop to figure out how the blocks should be pressed before I dove in and started slapping it together. I pressed toward the points on every block and that was a mistake. Pressing every block the same way made it so I didn't have nesting seams, but rather stacked seams, not so good. On the little quilt I'm pressing all seams toward the purple fabric so that I will have nesting seams to work with later. 

I don't know how one would figure out which way to press the seams properly if every block was a scrappy block, I think you would have to refrain from pressing until you had decided on the final layout. 

I have one more row of the large quilt on the design wall and hope to have the top completely sewn together in the next little while. Then I have a few face masks that need making either today or tomorrow. Before I do that however, I think I need to clean up the tables and put away what's left of the fabric used for these quilts. I have gained a lot of small, under 1", strips from the trimmings on these quilts and have decided to keep them to use for a strip quilt. I've seen so many on various blogs recently and think they look wonderful, there are so many different ways they can be laid out, it seems like a fun thing to play around with. I've not done any kind of quilt like that before so I want to give it a try. Before I do that though I need to pull my Cowboy Boot quilt project out and get working on it.

I'm linking up with Angela at So Scrappy for the August RSC 2020 challenge.

I hope your weekend is going well, that you are having some fun, and staying safe and well.