Never Time To Get Bored

It's been a hand work sort of week. There are now 10 out of 30 of the Autumnal tulip blocks with flowers ready for leaves. The shape, size and color of which is totally up in the air. I'm loving the sweet look to these, but wondering why I settled on 30 as the perfect number to make? Might have to ratchet it down to 20 in order to ever properly finish up.

Starting to get an idea of what the Tulip blocks are gonna look like

Still plodding along on the quilting for Blue Plumes. It seemed like it took forever to start seeing the stitching texture come alive in this quilt! Usually it starts presenting within six or more frames and this one has just been being stubborn. I'm very bemused by how the blue/white ticking fabric seems to be darkening {must be the dark brown thread} and the light cream and tan background fabrics look to be popping. There are some things that are impossible to know until we can 'see' it in front of us. Still unsure about how to quilt the darker blue thin border, but am sure something will occur to me. I never do anything majorly complicated, that's for sure.

Looking at the stitching texture on Blue Plumes

Another thing that I've been working on this week is the final touches to my daughters t-shirt quilt. I had told her that I was willing to help her figure out how to put one together, but she had to do the work herself. After dithering over it for most of a year, she finally just decided to have it commissioned. Quite the relief to me as I honestly had no interest in making one myself! When it came back {looking very professional, no complaints there}, we both felt that it needed a proper binding and perhaps a few yarn ties. Because of the addition of sweatshirts in the quilt, I ended up cutting the binding strips 3 1/4" in order to fold them in half and still have enough to fully cover the seam line everywhere. Double folded sweatshirt fabric and double folded fleece can be very thick!

My daughters Glory Days T-Shirt quilt

I only wasted a couple hundred inches of binding cut out in a different fabric, not properly thinking it through! I suppose the binding isn't truly a wasted effort as it will no doubt find a home with another quilt some other day. Still, it is so annoying to have to re-do. Thankfully I hadn't sewn very much onto the quilt before realizing the normal width of binding would never, ever work. 

My daughter also asked me to sew several patches onto the quilt which wasn't difficult except for the slippery backing. The quilt is backed with a nice, quality polar fleece {which feels good}, but managed to slip just enough for a good sized pucker behind one of the patches. Ughh.  Even though I thought it was pinned very well! Thankfully the fleece is black and so the pucker hardly shows, making it unnecessary to rip out and start over.*Whew!  Was not looking forward to digging tiny, same-colored stitches out of a fleece fabric! Oh did I mention the backing fabric was black? As was the binding fabric? As was the thread used to sew said binding down? Uh huh. Complete and total Insanity trying to see well enough to hand sew a neat looking binding.

Finishing up with the details to the t-shirt quilt cleared up the current stack of have-to's in the quilt room. Yay! I ended up spending one entire afternoon rifling through all the simmering stacks of fabric and barely started quilt projects. So much fun. It's been awhile so it felt very overdue too. There were a couple projects that ended up having quilt design ideas swapped, and several fabric stacks saw some new fabric additions incorporated into the mix. That always feels amazing--fine tuning the fabric stacks until they start 'clicking' better!

You know what that means though.... Yep. Gonna be some new quilt projects popping up here any day now! Right now I have good intentions to bring one or two already started projects up to completed quilt top status FIRST, but we'll see. No promises! Some of these fabric stacks are really starting to call out for a little play time of their own.....