Two more tops!

After almost two weeks without making a stitch with a sewing machine, I got back into it with a bang on Friday morning.

First up was a quilt top that need the intervention of an Exorcist. Really. It was intended to have four outline stitched blocks set diagonally with framed sixteen patch blocks. I had the centre sewn, the pieced border bits made up (see post about "January", below) , and I ordered a wonderful border fabric to bring out the red and black in the fabrics and embroidery. No luck – when it arrived, it was way short than I needed, end of bolt. So back to the drawing board, and a decision to use the embroidered blocks in a wallhanging; and make up some other blocks to add into the quilt, which would make it bigger, without needing the wide border.

After much fighting with the diagonal set, and working out the measurement of the four patch borders, voila! – a quilt called Changes – representing all the variations of this top; and most important the pinwheels representing the whirling challenges of life with two teenagers and my oldest son’s wedding in the fall.

Then I got to a quilt I’m naming Hodgepodge Strippy – I had written about the top in an earlier note. I had some concern that I wouldn’t have enough 4” patches to make up a good amount of blocks for a lap quiilt, and sure enough the most I could make was 20. EQ saved my sanity on this quilt. I was constantly drawing and re-drawing it to use up what I had without running out! What I wanted to do, and would have liked best, was 6 rows of 5 blocks each, with a 5” sash in between each row. But….nope.

So this is what I came up with – even the border ended up to be much narrower than I would have liked because I ran out of fabric. I’m going to use a red fabric for the binding, to bring out the slight pink in the sashing/border fabric. I’d also like to quilt it in such a way that all the plain fabric sort of blends together to make the coloured hodgepodge strips look as if they’re floating.

This quilt will be for my neice, or my sister, depending on how fast I want to quilt it! Neice’s birthday is in June, sister’s is in August.

Both of these pictures could have been better – the quilts are even and squared – but a teenager was being held against his will to hold them up for pictures!