Wednesday, February 26, 2014

There's black thread at the end of the tunnel

The layout is complete!  I spent a good portion of my class at City Quilter last night laying out all of the blocks for the quilt for my niece and her husband.  And another portion of the class moving the blocks around to avoid having similar fabrics too close together!  This is just one of those quilts that you could spend days moving the blocks around and I'm probably the only one who would ever notice that two adjacent blocks have a strip of the same fabric.

So, here's the layout I've settled on.


My teacher noted how the sashing between the blocks seems to calm the chaos of all those prints. Now I just have to get the sashing between all the rest of the crazy blocks.  I see a lot of black thread in my future!  

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Recommitting to my blog

Y'all may have noticed that I haven't had a new post for over a year.  Yeah...I think I was writing too much in each post (not a bad thing) and that took a lot of time.  As a result, I kept procrastinating, waiting to have time to create what I thought was an "adequate" post.

That was clearly ineffective, so I'm recommitting to my blog, and I plan to post updates at least once a week, focusing on quick posts about what I've been working on.

This weekend, my goal was to finish the remaining blocks for the quilt I've been making as a wedding gift for my niece and her husband.  You may recall that I started the quilt way back in 2012 (A Post About Something I Can't Discuss).  Well, I didn't get it finished before their wedding in August of 2012 (The Cat Is Out of the Bag), and I didn't have it finished in time for their first anniversary in 2013, which made me feel pretty pathetic.  So, I signed up for a quilt-as-you-go class at City Quilter, fully intending to use the time to work on the wedding quilt instead of the quilt that was being taught.  (Luckily, the one being taught is similar to a quilt I made for another QAYG class, so I don't feel like I'm missing too much.)

Well, I met my weekend goal.  Here are all of the 90 blocks for the quilt.  The first three rows of the quilt (assembled and lying flat in the photo) contain 27 blocks, so the two stacks have the other 63--yellow blocks on the left, red blocks on the right.





There's one more class on Tuesday night, so I'll use that time to get the blocks up on CQ's design wall to finalize the layout.  Then it's just a matter of getting the blocks sewn together, sashed, and bound!

After I finished all the wedding quilt blocks, I decided to take a break from black and white with a few soft colors.  

A few of my guild friends convinced me to join a quilting bee this year.  I'd always feared that participating in a bee would be a huge time commitment, since you're committing to make a block or two each month for whoever is the queen bee.  Happily (and just as Jody promised), it didn't take much time at all to put together the two blocks Mandy requested for March.  She provided a few fabrics, but encouraged us to add some of our own, as long as they stayed with her selected palette.  I added blue gingham, gray and white chevron, pink gingham, green batik, gray floral, blue geometric print, pink and white floral, and blue and white floral.  I hope Mandy likes them.


  
That's it for this weekend.  Stay tuned for (more frequent) updates...because despite the lack of recent blogging evidence, I really can't quit quilting.