A Finish and a Sandwich

This got bound, photo'ed, and tumbled in the drier today, ready for donation to Community First! Village. Diamonds and Pinwheels, finally ready for its new home.

71" x 90"

 The backing was a simple affair of a couple of yellow&blue&green homespun fabrics.

The top is pulled tighter so it looks straight-ish, making the bottom look terribly wavy!

A closer and overall look at the quilting: diagonal lines through the 36 patches, meandering through the diamonds and their light corners. It's subtle, but the meandering in the diamonds is slightly larger than in the corners. By the time I did the light corners, a tighter stipple was needed to "quilt out" the resulting fullness of those sections.

I bound this in one of my many striped fabrics (sequestered for binding purposes only).

And a pretty good look at both fabrics making up the backing.

The off-white AURifil (#2310) used in half of the top quilting was used entirely in the bobbin and was perfect for this backing.

True to form, at the close of a big project the triangles came out to play.

These have a purpose and will be sewn into squares like so:

I need 63 of these bad boys to get started on the next scrappy top I've been wanting to get underway, a Snail's Trail. But instead of starting the blocks with a 4-patch, I think this starting block will make an interesting and smoother-looking difference. According to the maths, starting with a 1-3/4" starter block (raw) will result in a 10-1/8" (finished) block, which works out close enough for my ~70"x~90" parameters.

As I looked around my studio this afternoon (which I thought was going to be spent looking at/for Meyer lemon trees, but The Loud decided he really didn't feel up to it after all), I noticed a hunk of homespun I had pulled from the CF!Q stash and put in a prominent location. "Hmm," I thought to myself, "at 58 inches wide and over 2 yards long, that looks perfect for the lap-quilt-sized Lady of the Lake flimsy hanging about." In fact, it was perfect. So, I next looked in the cupboard where I keep the batting scraps and constructed frankenbatts, and wouldn't you know it? There was a frankenbatt already constructed and labeled "for Lady of the Lake lap"!

What's a girl to do?

This got pinned in under two hours and I already have a good idea of how I'll be quilting the plain, large triangles (a variegated blue/green/purple thread [King Tut "Arabian Nights"] for the darks, using a large stipple, and the same thing for the lights but I'll need to purchase another cone of King Tut "Mummy's Dearest"). No idea yet how I'll want to quilt the actual Lady of the Lake blocks.

This coming Wednesday and Thursday is the annual retreat for the Community First! Quilters. I picked up our legacy stash the other day so I could bring it to the retreat location, and was astonished and gratified that it all fit in the car the first time around (I needed to make three trips last year). The front seat and foot-well held a couple of bins and the box of donated threads.

The back of my hatch-back held the remaining 14 bins, stacked 2- and 3-high.

Once home, I was able to redistribute the fabrics from a couple of the bins (the top two at the right in this photo).

Having two fewer bins will make things easier when it comes time to return these to their regular storage space, under some tables at the quilt shop where we meet 2 months out of every three.

I feel like the Stash Librarian now, reorganizing and accounting for all the fabric that's donated over the  year. I like keeping it neat and orderly so the members can "shop" for what they need and get this stash used up! (Note to self--look in the blue and/or green and/or purple bins for a suitable binding fabric for that Lady of the Lake lap quilt!)