Odds and Ends

I'm slowly getting a little bit of quilting done on Bullseye Medallion. I say 'slowly', because it seems like I've been skipping every other night lately. Oh well. At least there's something happening with it even if it doesn't look like much!

Hand quilting Bullseye Medallion

It's a long story, but the short version is that I got totally distracted by a squirrel last week. It started out with a mad dash through the orphaned/abandoned blocks totes and ended up being eleven doll quilts. 

Little doll quilts

These simple little orphan quilts were gifted during an annual harvest party {for the women in our church} early this week. The older women were having a lap quilt/throw exchange and I decided the littles needed something so they could have fun too. It made a couple of the girls sooo happy!

An opportunity to use up the elephant, kitty and bunny fabrics.

I ended up bringing three back home with me, so yay! One of my granddaughters will have doll quilts for the Cabbage Patch dolly pack I bought for her Christmas. The best part of the whole, three day funfest of making, was that I used up over 700" of leftover binding! Wallah! That tote closes ever so much better now....

Plowed through a lot of short pieces of binding

While that crazy squirrel idea was fun and a tiny bit gratifying, the underlying point was that I was definitely avoiding getting busy on the latest baby quilt..... Not that I'm dreading it you understand. 

Hst's for the wrench blocks

It's more that when a project suddenly becomes a 'have to', then sometimes I get a little stubborn about wanting to. Which didn't last long and next thing I knew, I was knee deep in marking, chain stitching, joining together the wrench blocks, and just generally doing what I was supposed to be doing all along. Just a short little journey until all the blocks got finished up, sewn together in {hopefully} proper color balanced rows, and thrown up on the wall for one last look-see.

I probably should have changed out the color in the centers

I folded over the top and bottom of the quilt thinking that would be preferable to making the side and top/bottom borders different widths. Just chop it off and have a nice, easy border fix. Nah. I could tell immediately what a horrible idea that was.

Applique prep is coming together

Today I finally quit fiddling around with different ideas and what-ifs and just made myself pick something. Anything. My daughter-in-law had laughingly said that if this baby turned out to be a girl, the quilt would need flowers all over it. Okay then. We'll at least put them on the borders! 

The side borders are 5" wide, so I decided to put larger flowers there. After a quick search through the applique parts and pieces tote, I started with one leftover tulip and a long length of potential vine. That gave me a starting place, but I wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea of tulips for ALL of the side flowers.  I really don't know why that look doesn't appeal to me for this particular quilt? It was a simple matter to grab some fabrics and cut out some very basic flowers to audition. And just that easily, I was satisfied.*sigh  Where's the manual? You'd think I could learn to fast forward past the fiddling and dinking around after all of these years....

The top/bottom borders will probably be lollipop flowers made with more of that vine length and whichever of the coral fabrics that look the best. I'm 99% sure that's the plan and yes, the vine is cut and ready to go. Gonna have to get the side borders all stitched down before I totally commit though. You just never know for sure how your brain envisions something and the reality of seeing it in right in front of your face! Right? I'm already feeling the buzz of pleasure that tells me I'm probably on the right track for making a sweet, but not too sappy little girls quilt. Lets hope the hand work goes along well as I need this quilt done by Thanksgiving weekend!