I am happy to report that I have met my goal for January – the Christmas Gratitude quilt is finished–I took the last stitches in the binding this morning. This is item #2 on my UFO list. With a goal of finishing one UFO per month, this year is off to a fine start.
This project busted the red and green fabrics in my Christmas fabric stash right down to the backing. I pieced the backing from 10 1/2″ squares of all the Christmas reds and greens in my stash.
My Myers Briggs personality test results reveal that I am an Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judger.
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You Are An INTJ
The Scientist You have a head for ideas – and you are good at improving systems. You would make an excellent scientist, engineer, or programmer.
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Our Quilt Guild has a new challenge–a block exchange. The theme of the block exchange is, “The Elements~Earth, Air, Fire, and Water”.
We were given this fabric as our inspiration.
This fabric is a small (only about 6″ square) piece of batik. The fabric is intended as our inspiration only and is not intended for use in the blocks.
We got together in groups of four. We were to make four 6 inch blocks each month for four months. The first month we were to make four blocks with the theme of, “Earth”. We exchanged the blocks with the other three members of our group last Wednesday at our guild meeting and went home with four different blocks that centered around the theme of, “Earth”~our own block plus a block from each of the other three members of our group.
One of my group members was unable to make it to the meeting so we have not finished exchanging blocks in my group. I will show you a picture of the other three blocks I received once we have completed the exchange. For now, I can show you my block.
I used the colours of the inspiration fabric to decide on the colour of my block and drew from the name of my block to satisfy the “Earth” element. My block is a paper pieced block called, Worlds Without End and is from Quilter’s Cache.
Once we are finished, we will have 16 blocks~all different~that we are to put together into a top and bring back to the last guild meeting of the year for show and tell. This is challenging, but fun all the same!
My Gratitude quilt is now quilted. I hope to finish prepping and attaching the binding to the quilt this afternoon so that all that will remain is the hand stitching.
I have two more customer quilts waiting in the wings, so I have told myself I only have this afternoon to work on this quilt–then it gets set aside until after the customer quilts are finished.
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I haven’t posted in a while. I was waiting to post once I had made some quilting progress. It seems lately that I take one step forward and two steps back and I just can’t seem to make any progress.
I intended to quilt my gratitude quilt last weekend. I loaded the backing and batting, and top on the long arm and started to quilt last Sunday. I am trying to use up batting that I have on hand and so I had loaded Warm and White batting (from the Warm Company) which you all know has no loft.
The vision I had for the quilting would have benefited more from a quilt batt with loft. I quilted spirals on three of the blocks and started to meander in the space between the spirals to fill in the space and help define the spirals. I was using green thread that matched perfectly with the green fabric in the border but it did nothing for the red fabric. My vision was falling apart. I decided last Sunday night that this was a bad plan and it needed to be abandoned.
Last week I was busy in the evenings and I couldn’t get back to that quilt. Last night I frogged all the stitching and cleaned up the threads so that the quilt would be ready for quilting today with a new plan.
I decided to choose an overall quilting design that was simple. I loaded a gold coloured thread made by Superior called, Highlights #703. I have never used this thread before and I wasn’t sure what tension I should be using. After trying to quilt a row and having the thread break twice, which required more frogging, and further tension adjustments, I finally have a result I am happy with.
This gets me to the title of my post, “Quilt Lips”. The quilting design I chose is called, “LIPS” and utilizes my Circle Lord Wave templates.
Now that I have settled on something I like, the quilting is going along quite quickly. I feel I am finally making progress after going backwards for a week.
