First Finish of 2023!

 Good morning friends!

I finally finished hand quilting the Red and Lights log cabin quilt a week or so ago, and completed stitching down the binding over the weekend.  Here's how it looked by evening lamp light about five minutes after the last stitch was taken.  A little late for Christmas but just in time for Valentines Day, with exactly one Christmas fabric and a few light pinks (more on that later).  My goal is to have four Christmas/winter quilts for the holiday season,  This is number three and the gray/red squares top from my last December post will be the fourth.

We finally had a sunny afternoon yesterday after several days of gray foggy rain and wind, followed by snow. 

Not too much snow as you can see and it was beginning to melt where the sun shone on the lawn.  Our dog loves snow, running along and scooping it up on his tongue every few steps, then rolling in it and generally having a great time.

The back:

After getting a few more shots and walking Gibbs around the yard, the quilt came back inside for its first bath and fluff in the dryer.  Hmm, even using Synthrapol and several color catchers, a few of the "white" prints came back a pale pink, thankfully uniformly, but pink nonetheless!  I had used scraps from a number of sources, some of which probably had never been prewashed. Interestingly, some of the whites remained totally unchanged.  So, rather than calling it my red and white quilt (actually some of the whites were creams and light tans to begin with), the new name is Red and Lights.  

After washing while finishing drying on the bed:

The hand quilting made it soft and snuggly, perfect for one of the grandchildren when they stay over on Christmas Eve next time.  It shrunk up a bit after washing, now measuring 62x71 inches.

I've fallen behind with blogging, reading others' posts and especially commenting over the past few weeks. We are settling in to a new normal after our beloved pastor was laid to rest on Friday, after serving our little country church and the surrounding communities for over forty years.  Last week was spent preparing for the several hundred friends and extended family expected for the funeral. Hearing nearly 200 people lifting their voices in unison in songs of faith and hope was almost beyond description.  We are blessed to be a part of this community of faith.

Til next time, stitch with joy and cherish every day!

Historic Panel Challenge Top

Today is the day Lori at Humble Quilts is having her linky party finale for her Historic Panel Challenge. Of course I do not have a finished quilt ready, but do have my top finished, and since the photos taken in early December now have the quilt sandwiched and ready for quilting!  

So many decisions during the process.  I really didn't want to make another mini or small quilt - we simply do not have any more wall space to display little quilts, and I wanted to make it a useful size.  This ends up measuring in the neighborhood of 72x72 inches.  The biggest challenge was trying to make each round come out to an even number - my old math skills seem to have flown by the wayside in recent months! No one was more amazed than I was when all those sawtooth blocks came out even when they were sewn together into the borders!  

Next up is the decision of how this will be quilted.  I'm leaning toward a combination of hand and machine quilting, although nothing will take place until the Janome returns home from it's next visit to the repair shop (see my previous post).  

Anyway, I chose this Barbara Brackman Metropolitan Fair print for the backing - it was the only reproduction print I had enough of to make a backing, and it had been saved for enough years waiting for the perfect place to use it.  

I'm planning to incorporate the panel selvedge into the label eventually.  Not sure of the age of this panel since I wasn't able to find a reference to it online.  Does anyone (Lori?) know?

The new year has begun with quiet, calm, above freezing weather, and the ice in the driveway has departed leaving us with squishy ground underneath.  But if the sunshine holds, we may see it dry out enough that we don't feel like we're wallowing in little stones and mud when we try to cross it.  In the meantime, the kitchen and back entry room floors show lots of little footprints as I'm not keen on mopping every hour of the live long day.  I'd rather be quilting!

So, thanks Lori, for this challenge, and for sending this great little panel a couple years ago.  I'm hoping it will be a true-blue finish by the end of 2023!