A finish.....and just in time, too!

Well.....last night I was sewing on the binding of Jeanne's wedding quilt.  Today it is all washed, crinkled to perfection, and I will be wrapping it up when I finish posting this!

Whew!  And it's just in the nick of time!  The wedding is Saturday, and we are heading down to Massachusetts tomorrow, to do some visiting with other friends before the wedding weekend.

I have to admit.....I really did like working on this quilt!  I had never done many flying geese before, and this one had 480 of them in it!  Turns out, I really like making flying geese!  Who knew!?!

I learned a few things on this quilt, too!  My biggest lesson......if I'm using a particular thread color for the quilting, make sure it's a brand and color that A LOT of quilt shops carry!  Turns out......there is only ONE shop within 2 hours of me that carries the Mettler Silk Finish All Cotton #577 (a medium/dark lavender) thread.  I purchased 2 spools (the big ones with 547 yards on them) and started quilting.  When I realized I was going to need more, I headed back, bought another spool, and it turned out, it was their last one!

"That's ok.......this should do it!"

Well.......no!

When I had just finished the initial feather on the border, I was at the end of that third spool!  I felt this feather needed to have the echo quilting around it.  I just didn't feel right leaving that area unquilted.  I didn't have any other unquilted areas, and it would just bother me!

So I called, and they had it on order, and expected it at any time (this was last Thursday).  I figured, I can wait until.....Tuesday, then I could quickly finish the quilting on Tues, bind on Wed, wash and wrap it up on Thursday......it would cut it close, but I could do it!

The thing is......they didn't get their shipment in on Tuesday!  So on Tuesday, hubby and I drove ALL OVER to try and find a suitable 'match' of another brand!  We checked 3 other quilt shops, the fabric warehouse store, Marden's, and JoAnn's!  My hubby is an amazing guy.....and what a trooper!  He was even helping to match the colors!  We bought threads at 3 different places, all of them pretty darned close to the Mettler color, but all of them were poly!  Ugh!  It seems NO ONE carries any all cotton thread in any colors other than neutrals!  What the heck is with that!?!  I guess I've been buying my threads from Connecting Threads for so long now, that I just assumed all cotton was available all over the place!

Anyway, I tried all 3 brands on my tester sandwich, and picked the closest one!  And since it is just the echo stitching around the feather, the fact that it is slightly thinner than the cotton actually works out ok.  The echo fades to the background, and the initial feather gets to stand out more!  I'm ok with that!

So.....here are pics of Jeanne's quilt!  The label sentiment is from their wedding invitation.

Oh, and another thing I learned on this quilt.....I need a new camera really bad!  This pic is the truest of the colors of the quilt.  Everything else is either too dark or too light to what the real colors are.  That makes me crazy!

I love making that swirly chain down the white border.  I did NOT love making the 1/2 inch lines down the inside border.....the stitch in the ditch with dark thread next to the white fabric was murder!  I'll never do that again!  I do like how it looks though!

Turning the corner!  This was my second time making a feather border.....and I really love how it looks!  The first quilt I did it on, I made the feather way too small, so when it was washed and crinkled up, it just disappeared in the crinkles.  I made this one with feathers the size of my thumb, so it was big enough.

This is the overall quilting design I did in the center area.  Freehand swirls with feather edges.  I really love this design, and will use it again and again.  I fills an area very easily, and is fairly fast, too.  And this was my other lesson learned on this quilt.....if the quilt has large pieces of a lot of different fabrics with patterns , just do an all over design.  I struggled trying to decide what to quilt in each large square, and it turns out, because of the fabrics, the quilting doesn't even show up in most of them.  It's just quilty-puckery!  If I had tried to create some perfect design in there, it would have been lost!  So, unless I'm quilting on a solid or reads-as-solid fabric, there is no reason for individual quilt designs for each square.  I'm so glad I didn't do feathered wreaths!  Eek!

Now I can start playing with my cruise quilt again.  I just need to finish up the borders!  I have not touched it in over a month, and Bonnie is on the second cruise right now!  I hope to finish it next week, so I can post it the minute they return!

Hope you have a really great weekend!  I'm going to have cake!  Yay!

regan

Pieced back is done!

I just finished piecing the backing for the wedding quilt!  I thought instead of the usual 10" squares that I've been doing lately, I'd jazz it up a little!  These are all fabrics from the front, just none of the whites.

Hey now, what's that white-ish dot on the right side???  It's definitely from my camera!  Whew!  :o)

And here is the front, complete with mitered borders.  I had auditioned several different pieced borders on it, but they all just made it way too busy......the center screams loud enough on it's own.....don't need borders screaming at me, too!  lol

I'm hoping to get this sandwiched tomorrow.......but I feel a need to go thrifting first!  We'll see what happens!  :o)

Hope you have a great day!

regan

Just needs the borders!

I can't believe it's been 2 weeks since my last post, but I haven't really been quilting that much, and I guess that's when I really think I have something to blog about.

Yesterday I hunkered down, and finally put all the rows together for Jeanne's wedding quilt.

I just need to trim the sides and add the borders, and the top will be done!  I plan on making a pieced back, using large pieces of the same fabrics from the front, something much more calming than the front!  Of course, my hubby immediately said that we needed to keep this one, and make her something else!  Yeah, right!  But I do really like this color mix, so something using this scheme might be in our future.....we'll see!

I actually really enjoyed making all the flying geese.....there are 480 of them......and I had never really made more than just a couple at a time before.....so it was a little surprising how fun they were to make.  And I have  a huge bag of bonus hst's now......maybe that will be a wall hanging, or maybe I can channel Bonnie Hunter and come up with a whole nuther quilt using a bag full of something that should be put to use!  I've always loved how she does that......has a drawer full of 4-patches or something, and designs a quilt around them!  I love that!  I just wish that kind of thinking came naturally to me.....I'm going to have to sit down with some graph paper and play for a while before I come up with 'it'.

On the non-quilty news front......I have a new refrigerator!  Woohoo!  Okay, you may be saying, "Big Whoop".....but it really is!  This is the first NEW refrigerator I've ever picked out and owned!  Everywhere we ever lived, there was a fridge already there, so we lived with it.  And most times, they were fairly new (maybe 5-10 years old), and so they were fine.  I've never been a gadget girl, or bells and whistles girl, so the basic model is fine with me.  But the fridge in this house, that we've lived in now for 13 years, was probably from the early 70's!  No kidding!  I tried googling the codes from the back, and it predates the listings!  So this baby is pushing 40, and I've been saying for about 5 years now, "When the dang thing finally dies, I'm getting MY fridge.....the kind with the freezer on the bottom!"  And every time we have been to the mall in the last 5 years, we've parked at the Sears end, so we can walk through the appliance section, I can find MY fridge, open it up, look inside, do a little dream of how great my stuff will look in there, close the door, and head for the real purpose of the mall trip.

Well, the old fridge did not die, but we were thinking that because it's so danged old, it's probably the cause for at least a third of our electric bill......sucking up all that energy just to run it's tired old motor!  And Sears (bless them!) had MY fridge on fabulous-amazing-can't-miss-it sale.......so it was TIME!

And tomorrow I can start putting stuff into it!  Yay!  I can't wait!

Call me a happy girl.....no more bending over to find stuff in there anymore!  And the doors have HUGE adjustable shelves, so a giant bottle of everything will fit in the door!  OMG!  And see-through produce bins!  I'm just so damned happy!  (Yeah......I know......I'm easily pleased!)

Hope you have a great weekend!

Regan  :o)

Gonna be a busy weekend!

I started yesterday with the garden......we bought the seedlings on Wednesday, and I wanted to wait to make sure the ground was warm enough!  Those of you in the New England area know that we have not had any sun since.....well......last September!  And this whole Spring has been nothing but rain and cold......anyone who planted anything two weeks ago has probably had everything rot!  We usually wait until Memorial Day weekend anyway.....just to be safe!  And here it is already.....sheesh.....I can't believe it's the end of May!  But it's gorgeous out.....sunny and beautiful!  Yay!

Here's a pic of the garden from the second floor bedroom.  John put the fencing up (those dang critters just love tender little seedlings!, and the electric wire will go around shortly!)....so I put in 12 tomatoes, 6 zucchini, 6 pickling cukes, 6 jalepeno and 6 green pepper.  I screened two wheelbarrows of compost for the little guys, so they should have a really good start!  I'll be setting seed with the green beans and corn tomorrow AFTER I get one of those screen hats.....because I have at least 20 blackfly bites on my head!  And they are all welting up, and hurt!  Sheesh!  I'm like a magnet for bugs that bite!  And it wouldn't be so bad, except they seem to go for my eyes!  So I have a big old welt right next to my left eye, and I'm looking a bit like Quasimodo!  Fun times!

Hubby has gone to the Jersey Shore for a huge kite festival.  For those of you in that area, it's going on Fri-Sat-Sun at Wildwood.  It's really fun, but I bowed out this year, cuz I'm taking a lot of time off for my other trips, and as it is, I have almost all of June off, so he went alone.  So I'm taking advantage of being home alone, and quilting my brains out!

I finished making all 480 flying geese for Jeanne's quilt.  And got them sewn in strips of 4, too!  Sweet!  It's now on the wall, and I started to sew strips together.....got the top left corner row done, then realized I had something else I needed to do first!  Eek!

My friend Betty at the town office is having a birthday on June 2!  Yikes!  And I've been talking about making her a wall hanging for over a month now!  Have I started it!?!  No!  So I got busy on it last night!  It's the same technique I blogged about on my October 30, 2010 post, an idea from Jenny Bowker at Postcards from Cairo.

 

I got brave this time and used the contrasting thread for part of the design!  I'm loving it!  I borrowed a piece of the pinecone fabric from my friend Brenda, who made Betty a quilt last year using some of this.....so the wall hanging will match perfectly!  Yay!  I'll finish the quilting up within the weekend, and have it ready for Thursday delivery!

And am I worried Betty might see this ahead of time.....No!  Cuz NONE of my friends here ever read my blog!  What's up with that!?!  They always ask what I've been working on, and the first thing I say is, "Have you read my blog?".....and they always say no!  Sheesh!  I have pics of my projects and everything!  Oh well.....maybe one day, right!?!

I can't believe I have to work this weekend.....I have so much quilting and gardening to do!  lol

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

regan

I'm not THAT busy!

I can't believe I haven't posted on my blog since April!  What the heck have I been doing???  Not much in the way of quilting.....and I guess that's when I really feel like posting.

I finally got back into the sewing room.....and did the quilting on a table runner that my friend Donna made.  I did an all over running vine, stitched in the ditch on the outside border of piecing, then did a tiny stipple for the background.  I will give it back to her for binding on Wednesday night at our quilt group.  I hope she likes what I did on it.....she had no input to what she wanted....she said 'anything'!

It took me just under 3 hours to quilt it.  That seems long, considering it's just a table runner.....but that stitch in the ditch is what slowed me right down to nothing!  It takes ALL my concentration to do that.....the very second I blink, look away, or think of anything else but the line.....I waiver off!  Of course, that makes me crazy, and I have to pick it out!  I did that twice!  So yeah, I guess 3 hours sounds ok!  lol

Now that I've finished Donna's runner, I can concentrate on my next quilty project.  When we found out the daughter of our good friend's from kiting was getting married in November, my hubby immediately thought.....oh.....maybe you could make a quilt?  Ok.....sure!  November is a long way off.....so there is no pressure, right?  Well.....then I made the huge mistake of asking hubby, what do you think for a design?.....and as I'm clicking through all the pics I have of quilts on the computer.....he starts saying "that one, or that one, or that one."  Well, of course the ones he was picking out were pics of quilts I would never ever want to make.....I just had pics of them for color options, or good border usage, or whatever.  But never to make that quilt!  Sheesh!

So, I narrowed it down to one......it was going to be crazy complicated......but I would started drafting it up.  Well, I spent the better part of 2 days drafting it, and realized there is just no way I want to do it!  No way!  So I got back on the computer, and started looking at pics again, this time WITHOUT hubby watching.  I finally chose a pattern I liked, and it would work with the fabrics I had planned, and I got busy cutting away!  Yay!

Jeanne (the bride) showed me her dress (she works at David's Bridal, so we stopped in there one day, and she put on her dress.....gorgeous!).  Of course, I was trying really sneaky to find out her wedding colors, or favorite color.....so I could plan the quilt.  She showed me her bridesmaids dresses....they are a beautiful wine color, but she had wanted purple, cuz that's her FAV color, but hubby-to-be talked her out of that (smart man!).  So there it was.....colors for the quilt......I pulled all the fabrics I had in the wine/maroon range and the purple/lavender range, and all the white on white's that I had.....and this is the quilt I'm doing.

It will be about queen sized.  The flying geese blocks are a finished size of 3x1.5.  I'm really loving the two color ranges together.....who knew!?!  (It just occurred to me that this pic looks like everything is sewn.....it's not.  Just the individual flying geese blocks are.....nothing else!  I would never cut off the tops of geese like that!  I'm just sayin!)

And I had a scratch off coupon from Joann's for 60% off  (woohoo), so I got one of these!

And let me tell you, it's the best dang thing I've bought for quilting in a very long time!  And this project was the perfect one for it!  I had so many 3.5 x 2 inch rectangles to cut for the flying geese.....like over 400!  And this ruler made it so easy!  I zipped right through the 6.5 and 3.5 inch squares, too!  I love it!

I cut out all of the flying geese rectangles and big squares in just a couple of hours!  Yay!  I'm not one for many gadgets or fancy extras, but this ruler ROCKS!  I'm so glad I got it (and for 60% off, too!)

Ok, enough yacking about it.....I'm off to start sewing more flying geese!

Have a wonderful day!

regan