Sunday, June 12, 2011

Sunday Morning Sewing

I woke up early this morning, as in 3:30 a.m. early.  That is early even for me.  I laid there for about another hour before I finally gave up and got up.  I was in the mood to sew and really wanted to do some piecing.  I wanted something fairly easy as I had a headache and was tired from waking up so darn early. 

I remembered that I had some cute little courthouse steps blocks that were sent to me quite some time ago by a blogging friend, who I think prefers to remain nameless, so I won't share who made these little cuties.  But trust me, the piecing is perfect.  And the pieces finish at 1/2 inch for a finished block size of 6 inches.  And these blocks weren't paper pieced.  Like I said, this friend is a quite a precise piecer. 

I was just hoping that I could at least sew them together adequately so I didn't do the blocks a disservice.  I thought I did ok until I got all of the rows pieced together and stood back to take a look.  Aaack!  I didn't pay attention when I laid everything out and some of my "courthouses" don't line up.  Oh well.  Instead of a humility block, I will have an entire little humility quilt lol.  I refused to unsew the rows so it is what it is at this point. 

I debated about leaving the little quilt border free when it looked like this:


I wasn't sure I was completely happy with that look so I pulled some border candidates from my stash and consulted my trusty quilt advisor (i.e. Dawn).  I texted her a couple of pictures and the border fabric we settled on was this one:


A quick press, a few passes with the rotary cutter and I had the borders cut and ready to attach.  Shortly thereafter I had this:


Not bad for a few hours work.  Thank you to my generous blogging friend that sent me these blocks!  She also sent her leftover blue star fabric and that is what I will use for the backing.  Dawn and I have a quilting day this coming Saturday so I'm hoping to get the basting done and get started on the quilting.  Who knows, maybe I can even have the entire quilt ready for display for the 4th of July, but don't hold your breath on that one lol.

A closeup of the blocks so you can see just how great the piecing is.


I am also happy to report that Echo has performed the quality control test on Chocolate Covered Cherries and has deemed it acceptable lol.


Sassy was enjoying the sunshine the other day, probably while plotting her next way to get in trouble. 


She knocked a picture off the wall below the plant shelf one night last week and I stepped in the shards of plastic on my way to the kitchen the next morning.  Thankfully it was plastic and not glass.  When asked about the incident, her reply was that the evidence against her was circumstantial and therefore she could not be judged guilty of the crime.  Typical.





Sunday, June 5, 2011

Quilted, Trimmed and Ready to Bind!

Thanks to a quilting day at Dawn's yesterday, I was able to finish the quilting on Chocolate Covered Cherries today.  This was the first time that I individually quilted blocks and I have to say, between the repetitive pattern and the same fabrics in each block, I got pretty bored.  I have the attention span of a gnat anyway, so the fact that I got all of the blocks quilted this weekend is pretty amazing. 

The quilting is a combination of ditch quilting and my wavy line quilting, all done with my walking foot.  Wrestling the quilt through the machine was a challenge at times, but I chickened out on trying the block quilting with my free motion foot, so I was stuck twisting and turning the quilt quite a lot.  Now I just need to find where I stashed the binding strips to keep them away from curious felines and I will be all set to get the binding sewn on.

The front of the finished quilt:


Closeup of the quilting on the front:


The full back of the quilt:


And the quilting detail of one block on the back of the quilt: