The End is Near

That's not as apocalyptic as it sounds. I'm nearing the finish line of my brother's quilt, at long last!

In the last 20 days I've been cross-hatching the borders, working around all the appliqued pieces which resulted in as much time burying ends as creating them. Once that was done, the edges were trimmed and the label made and basted to a corner on the back.

The hanging sleeves--I made two so there'd be a space in the top center where an additional hook or nail could be placed to prevent bowing--were basted to the top then the bottom edges sewn down. Finally, I attempted to determine a finished length for all the sides.

Celia check-in

It occurred to me recently (as I was making a new 'busy bag' of hand-sewing projects) that I've been shuffling a lot of Celia's GFG blocks back and forth, but haven't really taken any kind of accounting as to how many I've made over the past year and a half.

And, as I type this, I realize I never blogged about this project in the first place!

Celia, March 2020

Disappearing Ink

There were only two borders to hide threads in, not three as I feared yesterday. It took about 75 minutes.

Three-fourths of the way through marking the cross-hatching yesterday, the blue water-soluble half of my marking pen just gave up the ghost. Against my better judgement, I finished the job with the purple air/water soluble half, figuring I'd start with those lines today in case they didn't last very long.

They didn't even last 24 hours. How very disappointing/disappearing.

This border was fully cross-hatched yesterday morning. You'd never know it today!

On the bright side, I wasn't very happy with the spacing of the final two lines and had done some fudging of the lines on either side of them to try to hide the problem. Now I have a chance for a do-over! I'll work on the other three borders first. Perhaps the blue half of the pen will refresh itself enough over the next several days to finish the marking job. In all likelihood, I'll end up buying a fresh marking pen between now and then. Can't trust that purple stuff.

Reality Check

Yesterday morning, while waiting in line for the voting doors to open, I gave some thought to the next quilting projects that were clamoring loudest for my attention. My mother's quilt was nearly done, so finishing the hanging sleeve and binding would be a matter of a day or two of hand sewing. To the top of the list it went.

My brother's quilt weighs heaviest on my conscience, so I spent a peaceful 15 minutes (still in line--I was very early to the polls) considering various background fillers for the area around the appliqued border. I'd been stuck on that for some time now. Spoiler: it's going to be 1" cross-hatching.

Today, while Mom's quilt was in the wash, I pulled out my brother's quilt so I could start marking the cross-hatching lines. To my dismay, however, I was greeted with this:

unburied threads as far as the eye could see! I last worked on this in March; my departure for Oregon was abrupt and unexpected back then--I must've just folded it up and thought no more about it until today.

Project End

Today was the day to deal with the trimmings from the Twin Hugs. I can't seem to get enthused about another project until the flotsam and jetsam from the previous has been properly dealt with. Piled on the cutting mat is not "properly dealt with". So with plenty of passive-aggressive help from Zoe

all those striped fabrics were cut into Scrap User sizes (1-1/2" squares, bricks, and strips on the wall, waiting to be put in their container. Two inch, 2-1/2", and 3-1/2" items get put away immediately). Anything narrower than 1-1/2" but 4" or longer was tossed into the string bin, and finally anything between 1"-1.5" wide and 2.5"-4" long was tossed into the red tin in the mid-right side of the photo. Those will be sewn onto my ever-growing 2-1/2" or 3-1/2" scrap borders (one of which can be seen to the right of the scissors, secured with a green ponytail elastic.)

Zoe, once she settled down to cover half the trimmings, kept up a constant, annoyed beating of her tail (extra cat points for landing on the ruler as I was using it). She was letting me know in no uncertain terms that she was extremely dissatisfied with the quantity and quality of attention given, especially when she was so close.

Twin Hugs finished

I've uploaded the original photos, without reducing them to a standard 800x600, so this post is data heavy. You can click to see much more detail, however! They measure ~58"x68".

Quilting Stars

I've been busy quilting Thing One of the Twin Hugs. I commandeered the dining room table for the pin basting, then continued to hog the space until I finally finished the stars this morning.

I had a choice (one always does): keep the Brother in its spot

and clear out all this from around it (or risk having it swept to the floor),

or move the machine to the bar-height dining room table and sit perched on the edge of the chair for several days.

Perching for the win!