In my mighty push to finish the blue, red, and white quilt (really now, why do we always go with 'red white and blue' as if no other order conveys the same colors?) I put so much strain and stress on my fingers and wrists that I haven't wanted to do much of anything since Saturday.
Last month I had told the leader of the Community First! Village Quilters that I had a vet-suitable quilt in the making (she needed 15 of them), and even showed the group my pin-basted sandwich. I wanted to have it ready to hand over this past weekend at the monthly meeting, but to accomplish that I ended up sewing down the binding for 12 solid hours, until 3:30 Saturday morning! (The longer it went on, the slower I got.) I was never so glad to put the final stitch in something and throw it immediately into the wash!
Being the tallest in the room, I always volunteer to help hold up the Show and Tell quilts. I deliberately displayed the back first. "Are you sure it's the back?" is what I heard first (grinning to myself, because they don't yet know it was I who made it). Then we turned it to the front and got lots of gasps of surprise. "There's so many quilting designs!" was the comment that stood out to me. Well, yes! There are different block patterns, so why wouldn't there be different treatments? (I took a look later at some of the quilting done on the other quilts--lots of generic overall patterns.)
I was in such a hurry to get this bundled up and handed over that I didn't take any close shots of my quilting. Some borders were elaborate, some were merely wavy lines from one end to the other. Stippling stood me in good stead, but I tried not to overdo it. All in all, I had a good time quilting it, I got more comfortable with the stitch regulator on my Juki, and I'm glad it's on its way to a new home.
I managed to accomplish more than this and my mother's June banner this month. I got in touch with the representative of "Sleep in Heavenly Peace" here in mid-Texas and he'd be thrilled with any child-related twin-sized quilt I can create. I had the opportunity to snag some child-friendly prints recently, so I paired them with fabrics from my stash and have a pile of juvie flimsies ready to be created.
Pink has her own belt now, one that fits much better than the stop-gap Singer belt I borrowed from Rosaleen. That one just rested upon the pulley system, while her new belt (Brother, because Brother made the Atlas machines) nestles into the motor's pulley.
Five days now to create Mom's July banner, and this is what I'm faced with on my cutting table (the 'in the middle of everything' girl-cat can be assumed).
Some of the flag fabric trimmings can be made into banner segments, and the firework blocks I made back in January (but never used) will be incorporated as well. What else is associated with July?
Before anything can be sewn, however, I need to find my straightening-and-neatening mojo and clear this area!
Maybe tomorrow. Still feeling slightly racked.
There is a word for words that fall in a specific order. My son is studying to teach English as a foreign language and he shares tidbits from the day's course which meant that I learned about this last week. Pins and needles, mum and dad, brother and sister, salt and pepper, fish and chips, red, white and blue - they never appear the other way around. As a native speaker it's one of the things you know without knowing, they have a natural order but you couldn't say why. It was a word I'd never heard of and it didn't stick in my memory for long but Google has the answer - collocation. Feel free to spend the rest of the week spotting them in speech, which is what I did.
ReplyDeleteJuly here is the start of summer and the long school holiday so umbrellas on a sand beach, sailboats on blue but that would cover August too. Wimbledon if she's a tennis lover, Bastille Day if there's a French connection. For my own use I'd add St Swinthun's day but he probably didn't travel.
I sew my bindings to the back and then machine them to the front. The quilt police haven't caught me yet.
I do some binding entirely by machine, and others by hand. I'd made a couple of misjudgements with this one that made it difficult to do by hand (1: flannel, 2: flannel cut a tad too narrow), but was too stubborn to change my mind. I sure showed that binding who was boss, huh? (Insert 'rolling eyes at my own stupid stubbornness' icon here.)
DeleteMy son is also studying to teach English as a foreign language! I'll ask him if he's come across that term yet. It sounds like a jam-up of collection & location: col-location.
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Baseball, Tour du France, traveling/vacations: also July associations. Thanks for the free-association nudge!
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July: watermelon. The sampler setting for the RWB blocks is terrific. (Also RWB: red, white, and black.)
ReplyDeleteI found something that uses a watermelon slice as the U in SUMMER, and will be paper piecing that this morning.
DeleteRWB: classic color combos, whatever the B turns out to B.
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