Wow, five months? Mostly, I've been busy finishing up my big Dreamer patchwork. The quilting alone took over a year of on again, off again dedication.
This project is Mitten's favorite thing, has been since the beginning. Now she's pretty sure it belongs to her. I finished up the binding a couple of weeks ago, but just took pictures of the finished project this morning.
That took a long time. But it grew very soft over the hand-quilting process. I'm definitely keeping this one for myself. This project taught me a lot about spacing between lines of stitches. When two lines are too close together, particularly in a grid pattern, it doesn't come off as attractive as you'd expect by looking at the stencil. There was a grid pattern inside the square at the center of the star motif. But I stopped quilting that grid after the first star. It just looked bad. I like the puffiness of just the open square much better.
Almost two years ago, I bought this really beautiful flower stencil, and a matching border motif. Now that the patchwork is complete, I've been able to design a quilt specifically for these stencils!
I spent a few hours today arranging, rearranging and taking hundreds of pictures. See, in the store, you could see a much clearer difference between the seafoam of the green block borders and the white background. But from these pictures, I was worried it isn't defined enough.
So I made a quick trip to Joann's and was shocked to find almost everything in the store on sale. That took up the rest of my day. But I brought home the darker teal shown above. I think I like it, but I'm still deciding.
I'm trying to take my time and get it just the way I want it, but my eagerness to get to the fun part (the hand-quilting, of course) is hard to deny.
I'm calling this one Cottage Charm. The blocks look like little charms, and I've always wanted to do a quilt that looks like it belongs on the wall of a cute, whitewashed cottage. I think the finished product will be 4 blocks by 6, but I haven't made anything final. (If I'm being totally honest, I want to throw out all those blocks and start again with all new, hand selected fabrics, but my goal is not to waste money, time and resources. I already had all of these fabrics, except for the seafoam and dark teal...)
In other news, the Gammill Charm I managed to win a few years ago, and subsequently realized I hated using, has finally sold. I feel it's important to put that in here. It's been a long and weird journey with that machine. It's not that I was ungrateful or picky. I simply came to the conclusion that my favorite part of making a quilt is the hand-quilting. The machine took that out of the equation. And I just didn't want to learn a whole new skill separate from that. I'm sure many quilters out there would have adored this machine, but it wasn't for me.
I'm just not a career quilter. One or two quilts a year is about all I want to manage. I am very glad I learned that about myself. Possibly, if I'd never won the machine, I'd still be wishing for one, staring longingly at the precision work of a machine-quilted piece. But now I can admire that precision work and be glad that I'm going home to my embroidery hoop and Roxanne #9 betweens needles.
