Sunny but crisp and cool - my favourite weather

 The sun has been shining nicely for the second week in a row and that is both a good and a bad thing! I love this weather and so nice to wake up to sunshine.  But the windows are gross and I need to put that on my list of cleaning chores.  Plus, with this dry weather, we are playing tennis every afternoon and that really messes up my quilting time.  However, the rain will arrive and quite possible snow, so I am thinking positive that fresh air and exercise is more important than time at my machine? 

So what have I accomplished? I completed the January step for the Meadowland mystery. 

A second block was made for the Patterns by Jen colour of the month block challenge.

A pile of fabrics that I were stashed in a bin were pulled out and pressed, folded into 7" squares and put through the GO cutter with the tumbler template.  Both Heartstrings and Stashbuster groups are challenging members to make a tumbler quilt in January.  I had to wait for a cutting mat to fit the template and once it arrived, I got busy. 

The start of the tumbler quilt and am using an idea posted on Heartstrings of keeping the first and last tumbler of each row the same so it looks like a border. 

Of course, I can't work on one thing at a time so I started making wonky, scrappy log cabins from all my leftover bindings and trimmings from backings.  I will admit, I had to pull out some light fabrics from my string bin since I don't use a lot of light backings or bindings.  These are growing!

I was getting a bit confused about the order of the fabrics for the log cabin so finally clipped a block to my light so I could look up and see what comes next at the beginning... on which side! 

And here are the bins of lights and darks.  This makes a mess and one of the quilters on Heartstrings set her strips up with a sewing machine and dedicated the space to log cabins only, temporarily.  A great idea.

With all my trimmings from cutting tumblers and strips, I filled a pillowcase to stitch closed for donation.  And got a new one out and have it in my little bin which makes it easy to fling the scraps in there.  I have since found out that the pillows are supposed to be 18" square so will have re-do my pillow and will probably get two of what I have here.

So, the log cabins are growing and I laid out two rows of tumblers to see if I could figure out which layout I wanted to use.  Who knew there were so many ways to lay out tumbler blocks?

I did find some fabrics as I was sorting out what to cut for tumblers that will make a good quilt using my Carolyn's blocks, centers with two frames that makes great use of a fat quarter with little waste. So, that is now added to the project list!

And here is the finished quilt top using the tumblers. 

I also got my cat quilt blocks put together.  A bit of a crazy quilt but most of the fabrics have something to do with cats.  A few plain ones thrown in to make things a little calmer?

A close up of some of the fabrics.

And, more tumblers cut.  These will make a great project for a retreat because you don't need a design wall when you are making it scrappy.  I just alternate lights and darks and away I go!

So, some projects are now on hangers waiting for backings and bindings to be prepared.  Quilting in February will be on my list of things to do!