Here's the first update on my sewing today.
The reunion with the sewing machine went well. She's all cleaned and oiled and I even changed the needle. I wound a couple of extra bobbins just because, and now I'm ready to sew and be another productive member of the quilting community.
Before I begin, I should bring you up to speed on one of the projects that will hopefully see some major progress today.
A couple of years ago, one of our guild members made a quilt called
Totally Decaffeinated and it was gorgeous! I decided that I wanted to make one, but finding the pattern/book proved to be quite challenging because it was out of print. (In the bottom picture, the
Totally Decaffeinated quilt is the one on the right. See, isn't it beautiful? Kathy's was made with Christmas colors and it was stunning!)
Well the search was on and I finally came across the book (quite by accident) and bought it. Now you would think that since I fell in love with the quilt so easily and that because the search for the book was not easy that I would have chosen fabric and get started on it right away wouldn't you? Obviously that wasn't the case and this book sat about for about a year until this past summer when I decided that it would make a great "leader/ender" project. I pulled fabrics and got started cutting.
Par for the course, as I was cutting I decided I wanted to make a few design changes and the already large quilt (98" x 110") was going to be even bigger. (I'm still "playing" so we'll all be surprised now won't we?) The change didn't really affect my fabric quantities though because it's scrappy and I just pulled more fabric. :-) Here's some of the fabrics I'm using.
Using the leader/ender concept, I started sewing units in June of last year. I know exactly when I started because it was while I was in Washington Island, Wisconsin. Here's a picture of the basic block units that I began sewing. I started with the two patch blocks and moved on to the flying geese units after all 512 two patch units were made.
(Soon after I began working on this, the guild raffle quilt committee announced that they were going to make this quilt for the 2013 project. The guild's project is much less scrappy than mine but I know it's going to be beautiful! Maybe the fact that the guild quilt will be done soon is the kick in the butt push that I needed to get mine done.)
Anyway, for various reason, I didn't work in this project continuously but instead only when it felt right to do so or when I didn't have a pressing project that needed done. (There were times when I was working on two class samples at one time and of course that took precedence.)
So fast forward to about three weeks ago and for whatever reason, I pulled this project out and sat down to make some decisions about the changes I wanted to make. I decided that I really couldn't make those decisions until I had all the blocks done so I took the time and finished them. Here are the two blocks used for the body of the quilt.
Stacked Log Blocks (32 of these)
Rising Star Blocks (16 of these)
I am sewing the blocks into rows, and my goal is to have the inside of this quilt done today and begin sewing all the flying geese units for the borders. The original pattern calls for 66 flying geese units for the border., but this is where I decided to make a change. I'm going to have flying geese on all four sides, instead of just two. That means I have a lot more geese to sew. Fortunately I'm using the no-waste method and I can make four geese at a time. :-)
I'm headed back to the machine. I'll post progress pictures later.
