HST Medallion Progress and a Christmas Table Runner in the Works

I can't seem to get a straight photo of this quilt project, so here goes. This is the current state of my interpretation of an old HST Medallion quilt that caught my fancy. I always dread getting started on the next round of borders, but while working, generally find a renewal of determination to keep going.

Round #3 finished on the HST Medallion!

There's a lot of work involved as I'm not the most accurate of piecers. There are a couple things that are making things a bit easier for me though. Number one, it helps to cut out the units during the day time as my lighting is horrible in the quilting room at night and even the slightest of not-quite-right cuts snowball on me. Yeah, kind of a no-brainer, but you know me! I just tend to plow ahead and try to make things right after the fact! Also, I've spent a little time playing around with the needle position on my sewing machine. There is no single position that gets all the hsts to end up being perfect {again, I'm not perfectly precise with my sewing}, but there is one position that is definitely better than the others. And the last thing that I find to help is this: After I sew all the hsts into a long chain of 'pairs' of hsts, then the next sewing marathon involves flipping the hsts upside down and sewing from the opposite direction. This helps so that those long row of hsts don't have that funky arch from always sewing a little more narrow at the bottom of each seam--something I am terrible about doing when getting in that sewing zone! I'm sure none of you ever have that problem.

With this picture, you can see that I've just finished the third round of borders. Each round consists of a single black fabric border and then alternately, the blue or pink hst border. The last border was 72 hsts all by itself, something that makes me wonder how crazy one has be in order to continue on? The original quilt has 11 rounds of these hst borders and then two larger pieced borders to finish off the quilt. I already know that 11 rounds will make my quilt way too large, so at the moment, 10 rounds is the goal. We'll see about that! As the quilt grows, there will be more and more mixed fabrics in each round as I don't have a lot of large cuts of fabrics and want to shop straight from the stash. It's been especially fun to try and use these black fabrics that always seemed a bit too contemporary to play nice with so many of my other fabric choices.

Always a mistake or two

This is a project that involves keeping the seam ripper very handy and I've had to use it more times than not, even taking off one whole row of hsts to turn it the proper direction. Eventually I plan to deliberately let a row or two of hsts present in the wrong direction, but not just yet. Out of curiosity, I measured the entire quilt for accuracy and discovered that I'm 1/8th of an inch off on two sides. Waahh. For me, that's like, dead on accuracy! I'm telling you, making this quilt is the funniest mix of frustration and exhilaration that I've felt in quite a while....

Fabric pull for a baby quilt

Isn't it interesting how one project can so directly influence another? I quickly pulled some fabrics the other day for a potential baby quilt and hello? Aren't those the same colors I'm working on with the HST Medallion quilt?

But the little table runner below is totally different from everything I'm working on these days. Very Christmassy in all the fabric choices and hopefully the perfect size for a little end table in the living room.

Christmas table runner

My girls were lamenting the fact that all the little table runners had fall colors and what do you know. The very next day found me pulling old, languishing Christmas fabrics and thinking up a quick and easy design. Hopefully the little improv. strip blocks in the runner will look better with some Perle Cotton stitching. Right now the whole things looks a bit sad!

Linking up with Linda and Julie at Sew, Stich, Snap, SHARE!