Weekly update: a finish . . . and acquisitions

Autumn is in the air.  A squirrel left this black walnut at our back door which opens onto the garage. The closest black walnut tree is at the far end of the across-the-street neighbors' yard. 

The smoke from the western wildfires affected the sunrise over Lake Michigan.  (I was never outside at the right time to catch the fire-reddened sunset.) 

In the studio:   I finished quilting Serendipity Strings.  (The design concept came from Lynn/Klein Meisje -- she calls them serendipity snakes.)  The back uses a miscellany of light blue prints. It's approx. 68 x 84. 

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I used up a lot of 2" strips to make 60 HeartStrings blocks.  I have lost count of how many HS blocks I've made over the years. 

You will note that I wrote about what fabric I used.  Here is the flip side:  the fabric I acquired!

On Thursday I went to a quilt estate sale.  "I'm Mary," said the woman who answered the door. She explained that she had come from her home in Idaho to help her brother-in-law dispose of his wife/her sister's quilting stash.  Mary's a quilter, too, and we had a very pleasant conversation while I shopped. Fabric less than 1 yard was $4 per piece and fabric more than 1 yard was $5 per piece.  That meant that fat quarters were pricey but yardage was a deal. I opted for the deal.  "Since you're getting this much fabric," she said, "you can take any books and patterns for free."  I had only $112 in my wallet -- good thing I had not gotten more cash earlier! -- but I restrained myself on patterns (and passed on all the books).   I got 46 yards in all. Two of the pieces turned out to be vintage (36" wide) gems.  I also got the X-blocks template as one of the free offerings.  

These are the vintage prints -- 3 yds 30 in. and 2+ yds. 

I stopped at an estate sale here in town on Saturday when all the goods were 75% off. These Hawaiian shirt scraps -- 11 yds by weight -- were $1.00.

About 15 years ago my guild's quilt show committee put out a call for sleeves to cover the long wooden upright poles on the quilt display stands. Each sleeve was 6" x 126" -- that is, three 6" x WOF sewn end-to-end.  I spent hours during Christmas break making sleeves (I think I made more than 60).  The years have passed and the quilt show committee has new members. They've decided to abandon the wooden displays and instead rent pipe-and-drape from a commercial company. (The stands were a pain to assemble and disassemble. The husband who took charge of that entire process has moved (with his wife!) out of state.)  At our last guild Zoom meeting it was announced that the box of sleeves would be thrown out "unless anyone wants them."  You know where this is going, don't you?  I couldn't bear the thought of perfectly usable quilt fabric being pitched. 

The processing is rather tedious.  I'm cutting each sleeve into three WOF-length pieces, pressing them flat, cutting off the seam, and then pressing open. After all that's done I'll weigh them to figure our how much yardage there is. (And, yes, I recognize some of the fabric that I thought I'd gotten rid of forever in that long-ago holiday sewing spree.) 

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This week's reading:  I finished Manitou Canyon, #14 in the Cork Corcoran series by William Kent Krueger.  In 2020 I've gradually been listening/relistening to the series in order. Just three more to go!

I have just 30 more pages in Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook by Celia Rees.  In 1946 Edith Graham is recruited by the SOE (Special Operations Executive) to catch a Nazi war criminal whom she'd known before the war.  Her cover was teaching school to refugees.  Her messages to her SOE superiors were encoded using a cookbook. 

Linking up with  Oh, Scrap!, Monday Making, and Design Wall Monday