A Productive Week and a Lesson Learned

Nothing in the finished lane yet, but I'm happy to report at least a little progress on several current projects.

First off, last week I made the back and ditch-quilted the triangle squares and sashings on the first ministry quilt.  The group will tie off the centers of all the triangles on Saturday when we next meet, then we'll turn it over to our wonderful binding volunteer to hand stitch the binding down.

When I looked at the solid blue border it just seemed as if ties wouldn't work very well, and I needed some FMQ practice, so these scattered free-form dahlias were the result.

In this next close-up you can see all the little fibers on the dark blue - the batting at the edges shedding copiously onto the border!  Now I remember why in the early days I used to bind my quilts right after basting them well.  This batting was Mountain Mist 100% polyester - Never Again!   From now on I'll only order Hobbs 80/20 cotton or Hobbs Polydown and stock up for the ministry when I find a good sale.  I've used a lot of the Hobbs Polydown in the last year or two, for both hand and machine quilting and it has never made a mess like this.   Lesson learned.  Thankfully, we will wash the quilt after finishing and hopefully a lint roller will take care of the rest.

Next up was preparing a backing and beginning the quilting on the baby quilt needed for the April 23 shower.  This one will be totally machine quilted, no time for hand quilting, especially since there are three others at various stages in and out of the hoops.  So far I've ditch quilted around each of the large sashing squares.  Next up will be ditch quilting the smaller focus squares.

I'm on the home-stretch hand quilting my little Country Roads table topper.  Just finished marking the border with simple diagonal lines.  It'll be back in the hand-held hoop in time for some hand stitching tonight during NCIS.

It's a bit difficult to see the quilting on this one.  The pieced blocks are ditched and the four-squares cross-hatched; the background blocks have a stencil pattern that you can hopefully see in the next photo.

Oregon Memories is in the floor hoop, the first of the canning label blocks is quilted and I'm just starting the first of the alternate circle blocks.  Doing very simple quilting on this one, there's enough going on in the blocks that any kind of quilting pattern will just get lost in the action anyway.

The canning label in the left foreground is the block that is quilted .. can't even see the quilting, can you?

Sitting forlornly on the sidelines at the moment is this vintage quilt top I began working on just a few weeks ago.  This one is king-size, and I've found that stitching through that white broadcloth is tough-going on my hands.  The white fabric is fairly densely woven and the larger needle with the green pearl cotton is much more difficult to stitch than the size 10 between needle I'm using to outline the appliqued flower and leaves.   This is definitely going to be a long-term project, but there's no deadline for this one, thankfully!

So that's my little quilty roundup for the past week.  Hope you're enjoying some warm spring weather.  We're still waiting, though the last snowfall has finally melted and the weatherfolks are hopeful for the upcoming weekend.