Worldwide Quilting Day

Did you know? March is National Quilting Month! And this coming Saturday is Worldwide Quilting Day! A holiday just for quilters!

I hit the to-do list hard yesterday and got the green and purple quilt laid out in the morning. I am using this for the backing (this is pre-pressing):

I snagged the last 2-1/2 yards of this wideback at the quilt store the other day and got a nice end-of-bolt discount. It coordinates well with the front.

One of my blog readers e-mailed me a potential name for the quilt, so I am trying it out to see if the quilt likes it. (I know that sounds bizarre, but quilts have opinions, trust me.) Lilacs fit, definitely, but so do pansies and other purple flowers.

I pulled out some Quilter’s Dream Orient batting for this quilt. It is a luscious blend of bamboo, Tussah silk, Tencel® and cotton. We’ll see how it quilts up. I don’t intend to do any custom quilting on this one except, perhaps, in the borders. The main part is going to be an allover design. I might do flowers. I’d really like a pale lavender thread for the top, though, and I’ll have to get that from the store in Spokane.

And that border—once I got the top smoothed out on the batting—wasn’t wonky at all. I think the pile of the carpet may have been grabbing the seams when I took that previous photo. The top is now pin-basted and rolled up. I’ll start quilting it as soon as I have get the thread.

[The husband had a funny story for me when he got home. He had to use a different line pump company for a pour yesterday. It’s run by an older guy with two older employees. They were dragging the line out for the pour and one of them muttered that he was “too old for this” and said he thought he should retire and take up quilting. I wasn’t pulling a pump line around, but I did crawl around on the floor for a couple of hours getting this quilt basted together.]

After lunch, I sat down at the Q20 and quilted quadrants in two rows of circles. I contemplated doing the rest of the circles but needed a break, so I quilted the border with loops. I’ll finish the rest of the circles this afternoon and then that quilt will be ready to trim and bind. I think the Beginner’s Choice wallhanging will be up next for quilting. Do I know how I want to quilt it? No idea. We will all be surprised together.

I’ve got the Pepper and Flax quilt blocks up on the design wall. I added the beige ones and a couple in gray.

I’m still thinking on this one a bit. Having it up on the wall forces me to look at it regularly.

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I’ve developed a mucous cyst on the joint of my middle finger on my right hand. (Yes, I am self-diagnosing here, but it looks exactly like the photo on the website, so I feel fairly confident that I have it correct.) It is small and doesn’t bother me unless I accidentally bang my finger on something. I’m going to give it a week or two and then decide if I need to make an appointment to have it looked at. My mother has a history of having cysts in various locations that either need to be drained or excised, so this is not unheard of in my family. I am inclined toward conservative management ( = do nothing) unless it starts to interfere with my daily activities.

Our neighbor across the street texted me late in the afternoon and asked if I wanted to walk with her. She and our other neighbor usually walk once a day when the weather is nice, but our other neighbor is visiting her daughter. I put on my hiking boots and headed out. We walked about a mile and a half down our road, then turned around and came back. It was a gorgeous day:

Unfortunately, our next walk is going to require that we bring gloves and a trash bag, because there were an appalling number of beer cans along the side of the road. The amount of trash that people are leaving all over the valley—including mattresses and furniture—is increasing exponentially. Idiots.