The blog hasn't had any activity because there's been nothing to show, but I now have something to write about. Yesterday, the last day of May, I finished 2 more quilts, and 2 more "others". I made a big dent in my UFO pile last month. Here are my latest finishes.
This pattern is called "Ashley", from one of my many fat quarter books. I remember working on this in my room in Santa Fe, NM, and that was at least 3 years ago, so it's been in the UFO stack for awhile.
Traditional binding. Funny story about that. I had attached the binding, and ran about 8" short. Argh! I did some asking around, but the fabric is so old that no one had any more. I put the quilt away, with a back-up plan for "just in case". Sure enough, though, when looking through my scraps (reason unremembered at this point), there was the binding fabric, with more than enough for the small section I needed to add. Love it when that happens! Great complimentary quilting of ginkgo leaves and berries done by the ladies at Lynn's.
I didn't have quite enough of the yellow/purple fabric, so added a strip of "something else".
Red tumblers. This is a small piece - the tumblers are just 3" high. I cut them on my GoBaby cutter using only scraps. No new fabric was harmed in the making of this piece. Simple (almost) straight line quilting done by yours truly. I started the quilting using YLI 40-weight machine quilting thread, but my Bernina coughed and hacked like a healing pneumonia patient. Weird! Switched to rayon and sailed right along. (The experience wasn't that simple: it took me about 90 minutes of tinkering to finally figure out it was the thread. If you're having stitch problems, keep trying till you narrow down exactly what the problem is. It'll save you a bundle on service costs.)
Traditional binding on this one, also - because for some reason I had this black binding already made. Who knows? I had cut this binding only 2" wide, but it turned out to be perfect for this small piece. Moving my needle position 3 ticks to the right gives me the perfect measurement when attaching the binding with my walking foot.
The back.
After I finished the quilts, I picked up the next thing I saw, which were these wool pincushions. I had done all the handwork on the circles during my trips to California this year, then began stuffing them when I got home. Last night they finally made it to the top of the list and got finished. I have a bunch more of these to do. They're fun!
And so May went. Thanks for stopping by!
2015 counts
Tops: 8
Finishes: 23 (13 quilts, 10 other)
