Two More Finishes

Every month or so (when I'm not traveling), I give myself the gift of a 3 or 4 day in-home Retreat.  All those pesky things that usually distract me from my quilting focus are ignored. This weekend is my May retreat; it started yesterday and will continue through Monday.  I'm focusing on my enormous pile of UFOs, which I decreased by two yesterday (thank you, magic binding).

This piece has been a top for ages. I quilted it with simple squiggly line quilting to  refresh my muscle memory for machine quilting.  It will be a donation quilt, probably for the elderly. 

Back when my friend Joyce had her quilt store, she had a club that met once a month on Saturday. At each meeting she gave each of us a 2 1/2" square of every fabric that had come into the store that month.  I have sooo many of them, so decided to use them - finally.  Each of these squares has a flower, as does the sashing and border. Simple 25-patch. Makes a cute block, yes? 

By the way, did you know that a piece of batting makes a great thread catcher? And don't we all have extra small pieces of batting that seem to multiply like rabbits?

Keep the piece wherever you're dealing with small thread pieces and they'll stick to the batting like magic. When it's too full to hold anymore, run the clean side over whatever dust is driving you the craziest then toss the whole thing in the trash.  

The second quilt is one I made quite awhile back, had quilted just as long ago, but completely forgot about. I added it to the "needs a binding stack" and whipped this out yesterday.  This is the Cheech and Chong pattern from my friend Lynn, over at Country Crossroads. I've made so many of these! This one doesn't count against my "no dupes" project, though, since it was made so long ago. It is a GREAT pattern for showing off fabrics, and when you need a gift.  For variety, make double the blocks called for in the pattern and use them, rather than borders, to increase the size of the quilt.

It feels so good to be marking these things off THE LIST and decreasing my number of UFOs! Monster Week is currently going on over at Animal Planet, so I'm "watching" all the creepy animal shows as I sew.  If I get bored there, there's always a bad movie or two to be found on Syfy: I adore bad movies! Maybe they'll be showing Sharknado again. One can only hope. Or at least some awful zombie films. Maybe the original Night of the Living Dead. Whoa! That would be for the win.

Off to play with quilts and bindings. Thanks for stopping by!

2015 counts

Tops: 8 

Finishes: 14 (6 quilts, 8 other)