Life Happens

I said sometimes life gets in the way of our plans. I thought I would get started quilting the other HST quilt but that didn't happen. I no sooner got the last basting pins in than we had a medical emergency and Jack was in the hospital for 4 days. He is home again and after sleeping 12 hours last night he is feeling pretty good.

Here are the 2 sections of the quilt, all folded up and ready to quilt. I had to be sure to fold the quilt sections so no batting was exposed. Lucy will not leave the batting alone. I had to shut her up in another room when I was pin basting so she wouldn't tear pieces out of the exposed batting.

Here she is  on an old quilt on my cutting table, hanging out with me and napping guarding the quilt sections.

A Finish

I finished the first of the HST quilts. I have been trying to figure out when I started this quilt and I remember when it was on my design wall in the first room I used for my sewing room in our apartment. If it was on the wall in that room it had to be at least 15 years ago. I remember when I stopped working on it and why. My daughter stopped one day and when she saw it on the wall she couldn't see the overall pattern. I kind of lost interest after that. I left it up on the wall and I didn't sew the blocks together; eventually I took the blocks down and put them away.

Well it is together and finished and I like it. I think the overall pattern shows up well, at least in the photos.
















Here is a little bit closer shot. It has been a while since I sewed the blocks together into 3 sections and today as I was looking at the quilt I had a hard time figuring out what the original block was. I looked at the Quilt in EQ7 and colored everything black and white and I could easily see the block and what my block layout was.









 This is a block cropped from a photo of the finished quilt. Every solid square is a dark or medium print and there is a diagonal line of HST's across the center from top right to lower left. The points of the light triangles on both upper and lower corners point toward the center line. The light fabrics are a mixture; some are near solid and some have more pattern and approach being medium value. I remember not giving any attention to trying to color coordinate the individual blocks. the placement is truly random.

 This shows my finished rounded corner.

 I tried to fold the quilt so I could get a shot of all the binding on the back of the quilt but Lucy kept jumping up on the bed and burrowing under the quilt. I finally gave up.











This is the folded quilt showing all the many fabrics used for the prairie points and some of the binding. I used a lot pieces of leftover binding from my binding box. It was all cut 2 1/2 inches wide and turned to the back as a facing; it finished about 7/8 of an inch and added a little color to the all one piece wide backing.





This quilt also has alternate squares and HST' but the value layout is different and many of the blocks were color coordinated.
I plan to layer up this quilt in 2 sections and I have a backing for it that is the same pattern in red and white. I will finish the edges with prairie points and the same kind of binding/facing but I will round of the corners first and this time I will know what to do so there will not be any much ripping of stitches. Unless life gets in the way I am estimating that it will take 2 weeks to finish this.

We'll see!

WHAT ! The Middle of October?

The middle of October already, WOW! I didn't accomplish much in September. As the saying goes "life happens" and there was a lot of that happening in our family. It wasn't all bad, our grandson got married in Missouri and it was a lovely wedding. Half of our family didn't make it to the wedding because of our great-grandson's ruptured appendix and two separate stays in the hospital. Great grandson is finally doing well.  After coming home with a rash, nausea, and not eating much for 3 days he told his mother that  he felt amazing and couldn't wait to eat scrambled eggs and sausage for dinner.

Just before the end of September, our granddaughter and her 10 year old son moved in; we are now a 4 generation household. We are all in the process of adjusting.

This is a photo or all seven great grand kids; there are 2-10 year olds, 2-11 year olds, 2-13 year olds, and one 14 year old.  Last weekend we had a birthday party for 5 of them.  In the past we were having a birthday party every 2 weeks through September and October and then one more party combined with Thanksgiving.  Maybe next year we will have one party that includes the 2 summer birthdays as well. As they get older it has become increasingly difficult to get them all together at one time.

I did have some time to quilt.

I quilted this quilt in 3 sections and joined them together. It has been a while since I did it this way and I was surprised that the hand sewing on the back at the joined seams went as well as it did. I took my Advil ahead of time and my hands were not so stiff, though it was slow going.



I did not use a border but finished with prairie points. ordinarily that is fairly easy to do but the edges of the quilt were already quilted and I planned to add the prairie points and then the folded binding as a facing. That did not work well at the corners, too much bulk. After much fiddling and fussing, I ripped out the (several layers of) stitching and cut the corners round. I am still working on fixing the next 2 corners before I sew on the rest of the binding/facing.
I will keep this in mind when I work on the other HST quilt.

I sew several stings of prairie points together and adjust the spaces between the strings as necessary when I sew them to the edge of the quilt.
As usual Lucy settled down for a nap on the quilt as I was working. You can see her at the center top of this photo. I wasn't working on the quilt body at this time so I left her there but sometimes I have to remove here from my sewing room and close the door.

She likes to hang out with me and she sometimes watches what I am doing intently

 as though she was learning how to do it herself.

Other times she just settles down and purrs herself to sleep.