October Quilting Efforts

 Another finish to show off! Gold Crossroads ended up being even sweeter than I expected. The original inspiration was from an old quilt I stumbled across in a second hand quilting book years ago. Still love it!

Gold Crossroads

I find it super interesting that I was hand quilting this particular quilt when the DS Wagon Wheel SAL started. How crazy is that? My quilt was made out of cut-out circles and also, it is appliqued to the background rather than machine sewn like the Denise Schmidt pattern. Super classic look though and it seems to look amazing in many, many color palettes.

Another 2024 finish!

Some day maybe I'll make a brighter version like hers, but for now, I'm just crushing on the texture the hand quilting brings! Quilting in a simple grid isn't something that I do very often for whatever reason. Laziness? Or more because I really, really hate marking my quilts. Such a chore. Ughh! Every now and then a quilt just calls out for the look though and wowsers, this was the right move for sure.

Sweet, simple color palette

This quilt is the first one in my 'Circle Games' series where I'm starting each quilt with cut-out circles from behind other quilts. Lovely to have it come to a true-blue finish and see that I'm not just wasting my time.

Sometimes it pays to mark the quilt....

Flower Power is coming along with the hand quilting too. It was the 'next up' in the hoop. It's pretty hard to see what I've been doing as the quilt is so dark. Trying to do very simple quilting with perle cotton as always. Nothing fancy here either. Strings are great fun to quilt organic straight lines through. Always makes me wish for more of them!

In the hoop

Old Fashioned Wildflowers is all ready for an outside border now. I went ahead and powered through the applique. Sometimes its easier to not think about the time involved and just takes big bites out of it till it's all done. Will probably put off figuring out the border till some other stuff gets wrapped up. There's a couple ideas percolating in the back of my brain so I'm feeling pretty good about it coming together properly. Will just keep the fabrics together with the quilt top until I'm ready to attack the next phase of the quilt. Sometimes that urge comes from out of the blue, you just never know.

All the hand work is done!

Not a great picture below, but I wanted to show the prep work for Bramble Blooms II-A. I'm already putting in the hand stitching. After finishing Old Fashioned I really wanted to dive right into something easier and the skinny borders feel so much better on my hands already.

Ready to pin

All the details and prep work are done for Bramble Blooms II-B too. I used the same flowers and just made them a bit smaller than those on the original quilt. Seems to suit these quilts better. I ended up incorporating the same leaf shapes from the first Bramble Blooms quilt too {very important to me for this project!}. I'm really liking how interesting these leaves look instead of my normal simple leaf look. It's also something that I feel will help keep this series of quilts more connected, having a continuity in the applique motifs. It's the simple things!

Getting it ready for hand stitching...

It always takes a chunk of time to get all the leaves and flowers cut out out and the vine pinned down into place. Much more time than I ever expect! Once the stitching starts though, it's free sailing for those of us who enjoy applique. I'm definitely eager to see if these two quilts look as good in person as I'm hoping for. Using older, less exciting fabrics usually means quite the slow build up and then lots of second guessing. Are these fabrics actually going to look good in these special little flower shapes? Yes, no, maybe so? I wanted to get these two quilts in particular moving along and then I want to start a couple new projects with fall colored palettes. I am positively antsy at the thought that fall might be over before I get a chance to start something new. I mean, there's only so many open-ended projects my brain can handle at a time!

Meanwhile, we've been having a little bit of company the past week or two and that of course means less time for quilting. Then today I spent most of an hour on the phone with Verizon whose customer service is frankly, quite pathetic. Isn't customer service just so terrible compared to how it was 30-40 years ago? Why in the world would I want to try and communicate with a machine?