It Is Finished...at Least The Piecing

Now the real fun begins. My Seeds of Kindness quilt has finally been finished...the piecing anyway. Five hundred twenty-five apple core pieces with just a few repeats. I have also turned the edge under 1/4" and hand basted it down. The next step is to see what would be the best way to use the fabric for borders for appliqueing the wavy edge down, backing, and binding. I have a six-yard piece of apple print fabric, so I want to use it the best way possible. Susanna has already said she'd hand baste it for me so I can hand quilt it. It measures 58.5" x 70" right now. I want to put a 4" border all around to make the edges straight rather than wavy. Like I did with this Grandmother's Flower Garden runner.

Speaking of gardens, I weeded and raked for a couple hours today. I'm feeling it tonight, too! I usually get sick because of seasonal allergies after being outside for more than an hour or so. My delight in the task was hindered by the allergy mask I wore. It made it very hot, and my glasses kept getting steamed up. I'm about halfway finished with the chore. I had three 5-quart buckets FULL of onion grass. At least that was nipped in the bud. Tomorrow I hope to tackle the half-circle bed around our mailbox. We've had so much rain the past few days that the weeds come out with very little encouragement.

I was so encouraged and excited to see baby shoots on my hydrangea bush. A dear elderly lady in my church gave it to me last year. It had the most fantastic blooms. Bright PINK! When I cleared the leaves away from its base, I saw that the old dead wood was GREEN under the outer flaky bark and there are new shoots coming up in the center. Aahhhh...green!!

My lovely assistant, Rachel, with a new short haircut...



I hope to get my figuring finished for the borders and have the hand applique well started on this by tomorrow night. My enthusiasm for this quilt has not wavered. It was just dormant for a while. Like my hydrangea bush!

Someone made a comment lately (a non-quilter, as if that isn't obvious). I was working on my Seeds of Kindness and she asked, "Didn't you just make a quilt?" My family members who overheard just kind of rolled their eyes a little as if to say, "Does that matter?" It made me think of one of my favorite quilt quotes. It's by Alice Berg, one of the owners of Little Quilts..."..."Making a quilt is like giving birth...You're excited when you buy the stuff, then halfway through you think, 'What have I done?' but by the last stitch, you're already thinking about the next one." If that doesn't describe ME in babies and quilts, I don't know what does.

Good night!

~Joan

Grandmother's Flower Garden, Bound and Tabled

Get a load of that quilting detail! I love a quilt right out of the dryer. They always look so...so... quilty. I am sad to say that the stains on the ugly top block did not come out. But the up side is that I won't worry as much about it getting stained on my very busy table.


Here's a pic of Isaac holding up the whole thing. After I bought fabric for binding, I found the remnant of the piece I bought to link them all together. I am glad I used the red after all, because I think so much blue that close together would have been too much.

Tons of cooking to do tomorrow, so I don't anticipate too much sewing time. Good thing I got lots of that tonight :)

~Joan

Hand Quilting on GFG Runner Finished

Here is a sneak peek at my Grandmother's Flower Garden runner. At the bottom of the picture is the fabric I'm using for binding. All that I lack for completion of this besides washing and drying (and praying those 80-year-old stains come out) is to hand sew the binding to the back. I wanted to capture a close-up of the hand quilting in the half-circlish edges that had to piecing. See this post for the original picture. I ended up trimming off beyond 1" from the outermost blue hexagons and tapering the end. Hope to have a completely finished picture soon.

~Joan

Grandmother's Flower Garden...Also in Bloom

Here is a project I found when I was cleaning up my bedroom. There are UFOs all over our house. I find convenient places to stash them, and they are forgotten for years. This particular UFO is so old that I don't remember where I got the Grandmother's Flower Garden blocks. I really like the old-fashioned classic patterns. You know what I mean--the quilt patterns that everyone knows, whether they quilt or not.

I only had five blocks, and they are stained. In my limited experience, I have seen nearly all the stains on these era blocks come out perfectly. I got the idea of connecting them with a fabric that would match all of them. Hahahaha...more difficult than I would have thought. I ended up with the feedsack-type sewing print you see with the blue background. I added the hexagon-shaped blocks BY HAND all around then joined them together. That's the point at which it went into hiding again.

The irregular-shaped edge was one aspect I did not want to deal with. Binding that would be torture. So last week I hand-appliqued it to the vintage-looking cream in the pictures above. I basted about half of it and started hand-quilting it. Today I finished the basting (yellow thread) and have done more of the quilting.

It's ugly as sin. I particularly dislike the purple stripes in the ugliest block (the blue and black one--see the close-up picture if you can stomach it). I realize in retrospect that I should have put the ugliest block in the middle (where it would be hidden by our napkin basket on the table, LOL), but it's too late now.

I am using thread that matches the backgrounds of the fabric so that the stitches don't shout (since the whole runner does anyway!!). I love old (antique, vintage) blocks, and some of my favorite quilts are ones I made using someone else's beginnings and brought them to an end.

Stay tuned. I'm sure I'll be posting a finished picture in this decade.

~Joan