Finding My Groove

I am almost finished quilting Cobbles and Pebbles. I decided to quilt straight lines 1/4” from each seamline with beige thread on top and bottom. There is so much going on otherwise in this quilt; I didn’t want to add to the busy-ness with a complicated quilt design (which probably would have been loops, honestly). The straight lines looked good in both the large blocks and the small ones and I got in more practice with my ruler.

Let’s face it: custom quilting is just not my thing. I’ve always maintained that some people (me) love piecing and some people love quilting. Angela Walters pieces enough to get to the quilting. I quilt enough to finish the project, and as we all know, finished is better than perfect.

I laid this out on the floor of our bedroom to see how I liked the lines. At about three feet away, the lines disappear altogether. That’s another bonus, as far as I am concerned, because I want the overall design to shine here, not the quilting.

I am hoping to finish this today, bind it tomorrow, and sew the binding down over the weekend. I ended up not putting a border on, after all, but the binding is a chocolate brown print that I think will frame the quilt nicely.

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The new quilt design is coming together despite hitting another small speed bump in the construction that is going to affect how I write the pattern. I plan to treat it as a “quilter’s choice” situation: I will write the pattern with instructions for replicating what I did as well as for a more random layout that will be just as attractive but not require a design wall and an engineering degree. (I could have gone with the more random layout, too, but I wanted to stay as faithful to the inspiration block as possible.) The blocks are on point. I have no idea how I am going to deal with the sides yet—plain setting triangles or something else?—but we will find out when I get there. The photo of the original quilt shows only a portion of it, not the entire quilt. However, this design has been very specific about what it wants thus far and I don’t expect that to change.

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We had a video chat with the kids yesterday and got caught up on all the moving plans. The have a target arrival date in Ketchikan of March 7. There is a lot to do between now and then, but they are excited to be on their way. Yay!

Elysian is having problems with her internet service, so she asked if WS could come over yesterday afternoon for one of his classes. She is homeschooling him and signed him up for a series of seminars presented by the Field Museum in Chicago. Yesterday’s class was on dinosaurs. He sat in the husband’s recliner with the laptop and I sat in my recliner and we both watched and learned a lot. The class was over around 5 p.m., so I made him promise that he would eat what his mom made for dinner, then fed him a slice of apple pie.

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Corey Yoder has a new fabric line coming out called Spring Brook. It’s basically the same colorway as her Pepper and Flax line with some blue thrown in, which means I can get some fat quarters and finish that quilt I started last spring with the positive/negative blocks:

I ran out of fabric and the fabric I pulled from my stash to try to round out the supply just didn’t play nicely with the Pepper and Flax. I’ll probably end up with enough blocks to make two quilts.