The Final Four, and More

 Here we are at the beginning of Thanksgiving Week in this strangely disjointed world in which we find ourselves.  I hope you all are remaining well and have adopted the best motto I've found for our current situation - Faith Over Fear!  

I'm happy to report that yesterday I completed the final four sunflower blocks for my Diamond Jubilee Quilt, and that completes my One Monthly Goal for November.  I'm linking this post with Patty at Elm Street Quilts here.  So, here are the last sunflowers, definitely not perfect but best effort.  I'm counting on a nice lofty wool batting to fill out any little wobblies and wrinkles when this is finally quilted.  Optimist that I am ...

And here are all 13 sunflowers on the design wall, sorry about the darkness of the photo, our days have been mostly cloudy/rainy lately.

The next step will be finding background fabrics for each block and making a final decision on what method to use to applique these sunflowers to their respective backgrounds.  That will come in January since there's a lot of holiday stitching and other preparations to attend to first.  

And, speaking of holiday stitching, a couple years ago I inherited a UFO from a quilty friend.  She had begun making the blocks for a quilt called Holly and Mistletoe, found in Barb Adams & Alma Allen's book When the Cold Wind Blows.  My friend is usually a fearless applique enthusiast, but after making a stack of the square-in-square blocks and seeing the hundreds of holly leaves and berries needing hand applique that remained to be done, she decided to abandon the project.  Here's the original quilt, photographed from my copy of the book:

While I love this gorgeous quilt, and who wouldn't, I've found my eyesight difficulties make a large-scale hand applique project out of the question.  So the KISS principle was applied and the blocks were stitched into columns separated by plain strippy sashings and this throw quilt eventually began to emerge.

And here is the completed flimsy, throw quilt size at 56x67 inches.  I had originally planned to add borders to bring it to a larger size, but the quilt said no way - and nothing I tried looked good. The quilt had spoken, and who am I to argue, so after machine quilting this will just receive a green binding and done, hopefully before Christmas.

Various little holiday gift projects are ongoing, as well as my evening hand quilting of Sing the Blues MamaLou.  No current photo, but this one is progressing nicely and I've reached block 19 of 30. I'd love to have this one in the finished column by the end of the year, but January or February is far more likely. And my now oldest WIP, Quilty 365 lingers in the floor hoop, but it is DEFINITELY next on my list of hand quilted projects to be finished.  

Well, supper preparation beckons and I'll close by wishing you all a happy, healthy Thanksgiving celebration!