The Birds and a Finished Project - Finally

I woke up this morning and heard birds - lots of birds and I had the weird feeling that I was in a re-make of the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds. Check out this video and in the first few seconds you'll hear what I heard this morning. Of course I tried to take a picture of the HUNDREDS of birds in our backyard but my movement scared them away. Also, if case you don't know me and wonder what I look like, just watch the video and when you see a woman driving a convertible sports car, think "Oh that's what Joanne looks like!" That's right, I look just like Tippi Hedren and Jack looks just like Rod Taylor. The resemblance really is uncanny! :-) (A girl can dream, right?)

Anyway, I finally finished quilting and binding my hexagon star wallhanging and I love how it turned out. This project started out as a sample for the LQS Sew Little Time where I'll be teaching the English Paper Piecing technique using paper templates. As you probably already know, I'm making a large Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt and I'm going to have samples of that block, but I wanted to make something different using the same technique. After seeing a Bonnie Hunter post in which she was working on a hexagon quilt I sat down with graph paper and markers and sketched out what I was going to make. Here's Bonnie's latest post on the progress of her quilt. Of course Bonnie's hexagon star is much larger than mine, but isn't it funny how you have a vision of how you're going to finished a project, whether its a border, the quilting, or binding and when it comes time to actually do it, you change your mind and do something completely different? That's pretty much what happened here and I'm glad. Here's my finished sample wallhanging.



When I was getting ready to quilt this, I looked through my thread stash to see if I had a black and gold variegated that would look good in the background and of course I didn't so I settled on black thread. Well....I had some trouble with my tension when I first started but I liked the way it looked because some of the gold thread was poking through to the front of the quilt. I decided to play a little with some scraps and I figured out how to change the bobbin tension so the gold thread poked through the front and made it look like I was adding gold flecks onto the front. I payed close attention to the stitch quality and wanted to be sure that the quilting wouldn't come out or that there weren't any "toenail stitches." I figured that since this is a wallhanging that won't get washed or toss around much, I could have a bit looser bobbin tension than normal and get the look I wanted. Here's a close-up of the quilting. I hope you can see what I mean.



Again, it's one of those things. You just never know how something's going to work out and you just have to be open to changes. I'm working on the binding for the guild retreat quilt that was started way back in Feb. and has been quilted since June. I don't know why I've waited so long to bind this, especially since I really enjoy doing binding! The fabrics used in the hexagon star quilt are scraps from this quilt. I'm not going to post a picture until the binding is on, so I better get busy and will hopefully be able to post the picture tonight or tomorrow.