Triangles mean...

Not a needle is stirring.

 

Triangles are strung on the ironing board with care.

 

This all must mean a big project was just finished!

New start

It's funny how other ideas filter in once the troublesome parts of a current project are resolved. I finished all the feathers and added some cross-hatching to the dark borders around the appliqued blocks in Hubris. Currently it's wadded up and stored on the table of my Viking mid-arm, ready to be finished up with a cone of King Tut "Sphinx" thread over all the neutral fabrics. Haven't decided on a design yet, but after all the feathers, anything is doable!

Yup, my studio is as crowded as it appears. The Guest Room used to hold a goodly portion of all this, but it's actually being used by a guest (our youngest son) at the moment!

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.

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.

4-patch quilting

There's been very little "fresh eyes" quilting this past week because I've been waking up with itchy, tired, burning, 'goddammit-how-did-a-cold-catch-me?' eyes. Today they were slightly better and I could get a start on quilting the spaces around the 4-patches on the Gift Quilt. Hours of thread burying along the vine were spent considering quilting options, some of which were to free-hand hearts in the negative space, or fill them with straight line echo quilting, or alternate the two ideas (heart-lines-heart-lines, etc).

I ultimately decided not to introduce another design element (the free-hand hearts). I cut down strips of painters' tape to 5/8" and after some trial and error hit on the most efficient way to get the quilting lines established (create right angle units with 2 strips of tape, then center that [with a ruler] in each triangle). I got one border quilted (and partially thread-buried) this morning and am very pleased. It seems to be the perfect amount of stitching.

A Yellow Runs Through It

Remember this?

I decided to bring this project to the fore as something to work on after my "fresh" eyes were used up every morning. 

Morning quilting has been down the center of the vine (branching into the leaves and stems), in the sepals of the flower buds, and within the center of the open flowers, followed by several days of burying threads.

Heading for the Border

It was very easy to pin-baste the unquilted borders--everything smoothed out nicely and there was no unfortunate bunching, nor areas where there was too much top for the available bottom. Whew!

 

Straight-line quilting, at last

After my Brother machine's Spa Day, it was time to officially go from the Viking and its free motion quilting to the Brother with its walking foot and feed dogs. I'm useless at quilting a straight line on the Viking and will admit that willingly. Even though the middle could use some more FMQing (and will get it eventually), it was time to change to straight quilting for a while.

The Dining Room table has been coöpted during the straight-line portion of quilting this top.

Creation before Consumption

This title came from a post by Cheryl Arkinson ("Sunday Morning Quilts:...", "A Month of Sundays:...") that really spoke to me. Lately, after my first-thing-in-the-morning routine of 1st cuppa/blood pressure reading/word puzzle (while I 'rest' for 10 minutes before taking my BP reading), I've been going into my studio and doing some stitching on the Gift Quilt while my eyes are still fresh. Not catching up on emails, not checking the other bloggers I follow, not poking my head into Twitter nor ebay nor NPR. Just putting in some quality time on my Viking until my eyes get too tired.

And here are the results, so far:

Obsess much?

My various Leader/Ender projects, brought in as I finished one N1C top after another this past week or three, ended up being their own finishes as well. For a while it was hard to tell which project was Leading or Ending, so I just thought of everything being constructed as "Followers".

I also had an apostrophe as to where I could hang the flimsies while it remained so cold outside: on the living room drapes! The piano blocks a lower corner, but the overall effect remains.

The first top, in which I ended up with non-nestling seam allowances:

N1C Scrappy Trip Around the World (planned placement), 60"x84"

Waiting

 My sleeping brain wants me to keep working on this, right now, while my awake brain is trepidatious. (Get with it Blogger: "trepidatious" is a good word.)

Cataracts

 I'm finding that lots of light, strong light, makes it easier for me to do close work for longer periods of time. This morning supplied that in spades.

Worth it? I wonder.

 I've stitched the first segment of the green border, and while it does tame the wrinkles, you can't really see all the work that goes into it.

More better

 This is looking much more better now!

Now

Then

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I won't say I did everything wrong before, but I certainly didn't do all the right things either.

Ugh

The tablecloth isn't working out at all. It slips, slides, and shimmies all over the place as I'm sewing, and draws up something awful. I had to pick out all the corners of my first line of quilting, because as I approached each corner again (in the inner light green borders), the top would bunch up and fold over on itself.

The tablecloth as a back is causing all this puckering. I wasn't sure how bad it was until I compared today's photo (on right) to yesterday's.

I've only done the two outer thin green borders, so it won't be difficult or too time consuming to pick it all out again. I've got plenty of white-on-white fabrics that can be used as a proper backing. I suspected I'd have to as I worked on this last night anyway, so I'm not discouraged yet.

It'll quilt out.

 I've done the initial sandwiching of this Quilt of Love. Rather than pin baste the entire thing as I would normally do, this time I'm going to try Lane's (That man Quilts?) technique of quilting a section to his liking, then working on another section when he's in the mood, and so on until it's done.

For that reason, I concentrated on getting the inner borders taut and straight. I knew it would mean puffiness in the center and corners; that puffiness has been the bane of this project from the very beginning.

I can go in, I can go out. I can go in, I can go out.

For those of you not well-versed in the TV show M*A*S*H, that's a line from Larry Linville's character Frank as he taunts Alan Alda's character Hawkeye, who's under "house" arrest in their tent. It was a show I watched almost nightly with my parents as I spent the last 16 months flying in and out of Oregon (2 months in, one month out/home). As of this month, I'm finally out of there and back in my home for good. (The parents have been settled in Assisted Living and their house sold. Mission accomplished.)

One would think (this one, anyway) that having been uprooted from well-established routines and carefully-planned projects, once back home I'd want to jump right back in where I left everything. That has not proven to be the case. Instead, I was at loose ends for nearly two weeks, unable to dredge up interest in nor settle down enough to work on anything.

I hated the feeling of wasting all this perfectly good time (and, at the moment, weather) and took some serious stock of what was keeping me from feeling all the way home. The feeling of being overwhelmed by stuff (a throwback to everything I'd been dealing with in Oregon, surely) and the need to get rid of anything superfluous was the greatest anchor wrapped around my psyche. After days of letting things simmer on my mental back burner, I finally decided that I don't want any long-term projects hanging over my head when I hit 70. 

There: a goal. A definable end point.

Unplanned planning

Yesterday's plans--to browse in three stores for large outdoor planters on my way to getting my second vaccination, then purchase the ones I wanted on my way back home--were dissolved by rain. The thunder, lightning, and steady rain didn't seem so bad to me, but the threat of tornadoes is probably what called off the appointments. I've been rescheduled for today (and all of the Modesta 2nd-vaxxers got moved to Monday).

So with a wet day ahead of me, I worked a bit on my mom's project. 

National Quilting Day

 It wasn't planned to align this way, but today Mom and I put the first applique stitches into the border of her project: