Friday, November 25, 2016

A Finish

I finished sewing the facing on the second HST quilt.

Here are the two quilts laying on my bed side by side. The one I finished today is the one on the right and it is much more graphic;  it is easier to see the block. Both quilts are 16 patch blocks and both have an equal number of HST patches and plain square patches and they are laid out the same way with alternating HST and plain square patches  The quilt on the left does not have any light plain square patches and therefore the block is harder to identify.

























I like them both but I think I like the one on the left better. That is probably because all of the plain squares being dark give the quilt more color. For me, the more color and pattern the better I like it. My guess is that someone who does not like so much busyness would like the other one better.

I ended up with a lot of left over HST's and 3 1/2 inch squares so I will most likely be making another quilt.  I won't be  doing that soon but I am mulling over the design options. I will be playing with it in EQ7 while I work on some other things.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Monday, November 21, 2016

Almost Finished

I was ready to layer up this quilt October 22 and I posted that I thought it would take 2 weeks if all went well. On my October 29, post I showed the 2 sections of the layered quilt folded up on my sewing table all ready to quilt.
Well it is quilted and the sections joined and the prairie points and the facing/binding is sewn on. I have started hand stitching the facing to the back of the quilt. There were a few bumps in the road. Besides Jack being in the hospital 4 days, there was a follow up doctor visit, which took another whole day out of my quilting time. There were leaves to be raked and hauled to the wooded area. We also went shopping for a more comfortable chair for Jack (and a bonus find of a chair for me). That led to time spent rearranging furniture. There were many distractions dealing with Lucy and a few timeouts along the way for me and vertigo episodes. All things considered, I guess that getting it this far in a month isn't too far off the mark.

Here it is spread out across my bed for a photo shoot



 There seems to be a mystery lump here. I wonder what who it might be.













Mystery solved, it's Lucy. One of her favorite things to do is to burrow underneath something. She suddenly appears whenever I make the bed in the morning or when I lay something out on the bed to photograph it or when I dump the laundry basket of clean clothes on the bed to sort and fold them.








Another thing she likes to do is remove the pins from my pincushion and even from the seam that I had pinned on the back of the quilt where the sections are joined. I am now much more diligent about putting the loose pins in the pincushions and putting the pin cushions away.






This photo on the left shows the back of the quilt with the prairie points and binding/facing stitched on but not yet turned.



On the right are the prairie points, shown from the front, after the facing has been turned and stitched.

Below  is the facing stitched on the back at the corner. I used 2 1/2 inch scrap strips, mostly bias, because I wanted bias when going around the rounded corners.

The edge finishing was much easier this time because I knew I would be trimming the corners round. On the last quilt I tried to have square corners but because of a seam at the corner of the block there was too much bulk. It required the use of my seam ripper and there was much frustration.


I have my needle,thread, scissors  and the quilt ready by my chair with my Ott light and I am going to spend the rest of the evening hand stitching the facing.