A Week of Finishes
I had a very productive week last week. The first thing was completing the fabric organization that had been put on the back burner for 4 months. After that, a trip to see Tracey at Whirls’N’Swirls Quilting to do some longarming, binding both quilts I worked on, and then purging a bunch of stuff from around the house. To be truthful, I have no idea why these things take so long to get started, but once I begin I’m pretty good at finishing up. One of my favourite sayings, that really fits here is, “I used to just crastinate, but now I’ve gone Pro”!
The comic book boards, that Patti and Gail recommended, worked out really great. Nearly 200 of these boards were used for my stash so if yours seems to be of a similar size then that many should work for you too. The majority of mine were smaller bits of yardage (.50-.75 m) because I love scrappier quilts, but if you have larger pieces of fabric instead you may be all right with fewer boards. Check out my last post to see how I folded my fabric on the boards. I just love how my fabric cupboard looks now and I’ve found that it’s definitely easier to access the fabrics now that they aren’t stacked on top of one another…and I even found some that I forgot I had! You can also see that I store my smaller bits and fat quarters in some stacked plastic containers.
There’s not much in the way of wide backings so they’re folded and on the bottom shelf. The thing that is also great about this method of organization is that I can really see what colours I’m lacking and which ones I need to stop buying for a while!
My time at Tracey’s was very productive and definitely went very smoothly because of her guidance. I finished the hexagon quilt top that I began at the beginning of last May, and because I would like to enter it into the Canadian Quilters' Association National Juried Show this year, she thought that putting it on her longarm using QuiltPath would allow for a more fluid design…I’m still a little jerky with my stitching when it’s hand-guided. We chose a very gentle curved design called Modern Curves and used Glide thread in Kiwi… both really complement the hexagons. Here’s a sneak peek at the quilting in the photo to the right. I can’t show you more…yet…until I hear back about whether or not it gets accepted into the juried show. After that, I can show you everything about this quilt.
While Tracey was overseeing the work on the hexie quilt, I made myself busy on one of the other longarm machines quilting the flying geese quilt top that I finished last fall. This quilt will be for the single bed in the sleeping cabin at the cottage. I just love the wild and crazy colour combinations in this quilt. As a matter of fact, Tracey was looking for a project to work on herself and she just happened to have a flying geese ruler at her shop so she started making some for herself. Hers are just as wild and crazy as mine are!
The Caliente Pantograph and Glide’s Sea Green thread really did this quilt justice and the fabric chosen for the binding, black with multicoloured dots, finished off the quilt really well. The other quilt I have the top completed for is the Plaid-ish double quilt that I finished at the last retreat. It too is in bright colours with black so the 2 quilts will look great together in the cabin.
Our next retreat, at Retreat at the Farm, is during the first week of March and I’ve already started gathering up projects for that. After having organized all my fabrics I came across a bin of white with black and black with white large scraps and have cut out strips and squares to make a Disappearing 9-Patch. With my brights as the contrast I think it will be an awesome quilt. Aside from a couple of donation quilts for guild and placemats for Meals On Wheels, I now have to come up with other projects to take with me. What a chore. LOL!
