Wednesday, October 19, 2011

I'm a Winner!

I spent a little time hopping around blogs yesterday, and were there ever a lot of giveaways going on. Now, I don't enter these very often, mostly because I get discouraged when I don't win (call me a sore sport, I guess!), but yesterday I entered several just because I figured that if you don't enter you really can't win. This morning I was making my blog rounds and when I got to Gudrun's World I saw that I had won a copy of this awsome book:
I can't wait to make some of the fun projects in it! I think to celebrate, I might have to host a giveaway of my own - so you'll have to come back and find out more later this evening when I have it all together! For now, it's off to the quilt shop for work - wonder what new fabrics arrived this week? I'm hoping some laminate for the cute tote in the book I won!

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

One Done, One Begun.

Nothing like a deadline to motivate me, I got the Cross Stitch Quilt all finished up today.Here is a picture before the scallops were quilted, showing how I quilted all the short lines that are all around the edges. Instead of cutting my thread, I just let it travel between the two lines. I'll have to go trim up all of those later, but for now they are out of the way and I can quilt all the scalloped lines. (See the little dots between the two lines of cross stitched scallops? Those are the quilting lines on this quilt)
After the quilting was finished I trimmed up the edges to prepare for the binding. The binding is out of the same pink satin used for the back. I was a little worried, because this stuff frays if you look at it wrong. So I handled it very carefully, and it wasn't too bad. I stitched it to the back of the quilt first, then pressed it toward the edge, turned it to the front and top-stitched it down. It came out fabulous!
Before binding - so pretty! After I get the threads trimmed I will take some nicer pictures to document it. Rumor has it that the maker of the top has another for me to quilt - I'll look forward to it, this was a really nice project.
Here's the next one on the list. It's a beautiful stained glass quilt that my student and I have been working on for a year now. The top is finished and I get to do all the quilting. The pattern says to quilt cloud shapes on the sky - what do you think? I like it, and think the variegated thread is really nice here. I'll be adding some lines from the star to the outside in metallic thread later. The quilting is doing a great job of taking in the bagginess from the bias tape being stitched on. I'd like to finish this one by the end of the month, so you'll see more on it as I go!

Time to go work on my hand-quilting now. It was a good day for stitching!

Monday, October 17, 2011

Cross Hatch Quilting


Today I worked on the cross hatch stitching on the cross stitch quilt (sorry for the poor picture, should have taken it during the day time). I use my walking foot for this, I was a little worried because the top was a little uneven because of the cross stitching, but it worked great. For this one I did a little back stitch at the end of my lines and trimmed the thread ends close. Tomorrow I will finish up free-motioning the scallops on the edge, trim it and bind it! It will be very nice to cross a project off my very long list!