A cool, rainy, indoor kind of day

It's cool and kind of drizzling outside today.  Indoors I'm working on the binding on my BIG Saturday Sampler quilt called New Age, while watching President's Cup golf on TV.  And watching the wildlife wander through the yard.  We have a flock of wild turkeys that come through every day. They eat the seed that the little birds drop out of the 2 bird feeders hanging in the trees. You can just barely see the green feeder in the upper right.  Life is good!

I had an hour

And in an hour I made a pair of pillowcases, and pressed the bindings I made yesterday.  The burgundy roll of binding is about 450" long.  The brown one is only about 150".

Midnight inspiration

 

Just before midnight last night I had a sudden idea. I was sitting in bed with my iPad, looking at "quilty" pictures online when it suddenly hit me - I can quilt this pinwheel quilt using a decorative stitch in the ditch. I've used this technique on a couple of wall hanging/table runner sized pieces, but it suddenly dawned on me that it could work very well for this design. 

 

So at midnight I was downstairs in my basement sewing room, looking at backing options. Keep in mind that the lighting in my sewing room is pathetic in the daytime and at night it's even worse.  I really need to do something about that soon!  Anyway, I found a possible backing that is a leftover from another project, and it seemed to be a good option even in the bad lighting. And I had a perfectly sized piece of leftover batting on the top of the stack of leftover batting in the closet.

 

This photo doesn't do any of the colors justice, but I hung the backing and the flimsy over my front porch railing this morning to see if the color worked in real daylight.  I like it. This backing is a "dusty" version of a couple of the greens in the pinwheels.  Now that I have a plan I'm quite excited to get to work on it.

 

And here lies my next problem . . .

 

 

My husband and I both work from home.  I now have the upstairs home office with the great windows.  He has a perfectly good office space in the basement with a big desk, expensive ergonomic chair for his bad back, good lighting, storage, double computer monitors, big screen TV, pool table, sofa, etc.  But periodically he comes back upstairs and works at the dining room table. With the hard wooden chair.  And, since I used that basement space for years as my office - before the extra comforts - I know EXACTLY why he is upstairs. It's because it's a dungeon with almost no natural light.  And it gets really chilly in spring and fall when the heating/cooling system hardly runs at all.

 

And my problem is that I usually use my dining room table to lay out a quilt for sandwiching and pin basting. Guess that's not happening this morning.

 

Sewing room closet

My sewing room is actually just a large basement bedroom and it has a nice big closet.  I have several plastic storage drawer units in it for storing fabric.  But the hanging rod comes in very handy for hanging up flimsies waiting to be quilted and sets of blocks waiting to become something. There are now 6 quilt tops hanging there that need to be quilted.  Two of them have backs hanging with them.

This has always been one of my problems with the whole quilting process.  I just don't have the skills or the patience to hand or machine quilt anything very large. And I don't have the cash to hire all of my quilting done. So the tops tend to hang around, pun intended. At least all of these are either kid sized or lap sized. Maybe I can choose one per month to quilt, either hired or attempting one myself. 

Design Wall Monday - Polka Dot Pinwheels

Design Wall Monday - and I finally have something accomplished. Check out what others are working on at:  http://smallquiltsanddollquilts.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

I used a charm pack of Blueberry Park (Robert Kaufman) fabric, plus a background fabric to make these pinwheels.  The colors are very fresh and overall I like the result.  It's about 40" by 50", so a nice sized baby quilt.

 

However, this is not one of my better examples of technique.  In spite of constant measuring and squaring up, I have ripples.  My borders are not laying flat.  I measured every row in this quilt before cutting those borders and cut them 1/4" smaller.  And they still appear to have stretched.  I'm hoping the ripples will "quilt out". Or maybe once it's been washed (after quilting) it will be OK.

Plugging along

Slowly but surely . . .

One down, three to go

 

I have 3 more of these blocks left to finish with the cream/green borders. And then there are pieced outer borders that go around all 4 of the blocks.  This Kim Diehl project has been slow going for me. Not particularly difficult, but slow going. 

 

But since our class is this coming Saturday afternoon, I plan to have the top done by then. Plus it's one of my monthly goals.