Shoo Fly Garden Progress Update

I put my Shoo Fly Garden blocks up on the design wall to make it easier to prep new blocks without repeating fabrics, so I figured it's a good time to share a little progress report.

Before I show you what I have so far, here's a look at the quilt I'm heading towards (eventually).

Yes, there are wonky block corners. I'm too lazy to fix the mockup!

I have a tutorial for the Shoo Fly Garden block and another tutorial for doing appliqué with a ladder stitch, which is how I'm attaching the EPP flowers to their backgrounds. The throw size quilt I'm working on requires 154 blocks. So how many do I have?

As of today, I have 27 finished blocks, 39 flowers appliquéd to their backgrounds and awaiting corners, and 7 flowers sewn together, but not yet appliquéd to their backgrounds. That's a total of 73, which is close to half the blocks needed. I also have hexies basted for a few more blocks, ready for the next time we're on the road. 

This month, I basted hexies and stitched flowers while traveling to St. John's and back (twice) and at a church women's retreat. 

I had been using adding the snowball corners as one of my leaders-and-enders projects (the other is making stitch-and-flip flying geese for my Flying Together blocks), but I've slacked off on that lately because I used all the black squares I had cut. The WIPS-B-GONE challenge starts on October 1st, and I plan to make cutting out more squares one of my daily tasks right at the beginning of the challenge. Now that I see them all together, I'm excited to get back to turning these in-progress blocks into finished blocks!

Obviously, I'm still a long way from finishing my Shoo Fly Garden quilt, but that's fine by me. I designed this with the intention of it being a multi-year project and I'm in no rush to finish. Do you enjoy long-term, slow stitching projects?

WIPS-B-GONE 2026

It's that time of year - the annual WIPS-B-GONE challenge is open for registration! This is the 6th year for the free WIP-finishing challenge, and I'm excited to help motivate you to finish some long-standing projects (and to finish some myself!) 😊

What is WIPS-B-GONE?

It's two months to focus on making progress on your quilty works-in-progress (WIPs) with friends and some extra support from me. The challenge starts October 1st and runs until the end of November, so we'll have 61 days to work on those projects that have been sitting unfinished for too long.

Whether you have a collection of quilt blocks cut out, but not sewn together, or a stash of blocks finished, but not sewn into a quilt top, or a pile of quilt tops that need quilting, it's so much easier to use, display, or gift a quilt that's finished, so let's move some of them across that finish line!

Extra support to make it easier

When you sign up for the WIPS-B-GONE challenge, you'll get a link to download:

• a project list, so you can see at a glance which projects you plan to work on and check them off as you finish them
• a daily tracker (there are 3 to choose from!), so you can colour in an icon for each day you work on a WIP. The daily trackers are consistently one of the favourite parts of the challenge every year 😊
• graphics you can share on social media to show you're participating in the challenge and to invite your quilty friends to join us, too! The more, the merrier!

A daily tracker from a previous year

Monday Motivation

Along with the downloads, you'll also receive Monday Motivation emails all through the challenge to help you stay on track. Sticking with something for 61 days can be a challenge, and I hope these emails will be the extra dose of motivation you need to keep you going.

Community

If you're on social media, you can post your progress and use the hashtag #wipsbgone2026 so other participants can find your post and cheer you on. A challenge is more fun when you're doing it with friends!

Of course, you don't have to share on social media to take part in the challenge. Simply download your daily tracker, choose some WIPs, and make a little progress on them each day.

Finished the quilt top during WIPS-B-GONE 2024 - I'll still be quilting it this year

Are you in?

If you want to finish some quilts this fall, join us for WIPS-B-GONE 2026!

Disco Squares Quilt

 In my ongoing quest to blog the quilts I've finished, but not yet shared, I'm happy to finally share Disco Squares with you!

Disco Squares was the Stash Artists pattern back in November. When I finished making it, we had a run of bad weather, so Paul and I were only able to sneak out one afternoon between rain showers to snap a quick picture for the pattern cover before it was released to the members. We had to be very careful the quilt didn't touch the wet, muddy ground and laying it down anywhere was definitely not an option. I figured it was no big deal, I'd just get the pictures for a blog post the next chance we had...and then promptly set it aside and didn't get around to taking those pictures until last month. Better late than never, right?

I loved digging through my scraps for the pinks, teals, and blues. Some of the black pieces came from my scraps, too, but I don't think I had enough to cut all of the black from scraps. That's one of the downfalls of waiting so long to write the post, I forget some of the details of the making. 

I do remember that I bought the cream solid because I wanted something softer than white. Cream isn't a colour I use a lot in my quilts, though I'm actually using it right now for the background of another quilt that will also be a Stash Artists pattern.

Finding enough blues was no problem, of course! Nothing seems to ever empty my blue scrap basket, or even get it down to just full, rather than overflowing 😅 I'm not complaining, though. Making scrappy blue quilts always makes me happy, so I'd probably be very sad if I ever ran out of blue scraps.

When it came time for the quilting, I decided to go bold and use bright pink thread (Aurifil 2530). I quilted a meandering spiral, intentionally not traveling directly over the same path in and out of the spiral. I love the randomly doubled look that gives the spiral. With the same cream solid on the back, the pink quilting shows up beautifully.

The day we went to the beach for this photo shoot was a little windier than is ideal for quilt pictures, so I caught this shot of the quilt trying to escape!

And here's the picture I was trying to get. I do love a quilt picture with the ocean in the background!

And pictures of quilts laid out on the beach rocks. Really, I just love any excuse to go to the beach!

The binding is scrappy, but it's all teals that are pretty similar, so it looks like it's one fabric until you get up close.

When we had a team of guys putting mini split heat pumps in the house in June, one of them spotted Disco Squares sticking out of a stack of quilts and commented that he really liked the colours in it. I do, too! Pink and blue together can sometimes feel childish, like a gender reveal or something, but I feel like I avoided that here by adding the black and cream. And because there aren't a lot of pastels, the combination of pinks, blues, and teals feels like it has a lot of energy.

Want to make your own Disco Squares quilt? Come join us in Stash Artists! Stash Artists is for quilters who want to use the fabric they already own, and new members get access to the Disco Squares pattern as soon as they join, along with the full pattern library of scrappy and stash-friendly patterns. There are virtual sew days, too, and we'd love to have you join us!

I'm still finding it hard to balance my work as a virtual assistant (which is all on the computer), my pattern business, (which requires a lot of computer work), and blogging (which obviously also has to be done on a computer), without feeling like I'm spending all day looking at a screen. I find it helps to do something active in between sessions on the computer, or to do some sewing. I still have a few more finished quilts to share, so I'm going to make it my fall project to try to get caught up 😊  Hopefully I'll be back next week with another one!