Digging out

I have a number of unfinished projects waiting patiently for me to get back to them. I go in thinking I should make progress on the current stack of projects, and then my imagination is spirited away by the idea of doing kaleidoscopic hexagon blocks! Or I see a quilt using Japanese indigos and think of how I could make inroads on using my own indigos! And lo, another project is born.

But enough. I hereby make the modest resolution to finish at least two of my current projects before I allow myself to do any more than think of anything new.

TARGETS:
1) Quilt with yellow friendship stars: DONE!
- choose fabric for backing from stash
- sew together backing fabrics
- piece batting
- make binding
- lay out and pin together layers
- tie quilt
- baste and trim
- sew binding on front
- sew binding on back
- make mad dash to get new bottle of Synthrapol to fix bleeding dye
- wash and iron
- sew on Linus label

2) Aqua lotus quilt:
- make binding
- finish hand quilting in hoop
- re-do some hand quilting near edges of quilt (stretched out of whack in hoop)
- pin/baste and trim edges
- machine bind front
- hand bind back

I welcome pointed comments and reminders about these tasks if I don't seem to be making any progress! :)

And delivered!

We shipped via FedEx, for no particularly good reason. One positive thing about FedEx (other than the knowledge that, after handing over your box, your wallet will no longer be cluttered with pesky dollar bills :-P ) is that they have an excellent online tracking system. I did relish having access to that information this weekend, to see the quilt make its way across the country; but I especially loved knowing, within 9 minutes of the actual delivery, that it had been delivered straight into Grandma's hands.

When I saw this, I IM'ed DH and he called his parents to give them a heads up. Not long after, his mother called me and relayed the following:

She had called Grandma within 19 minutes of the delivery, thinking that this would surely be enough time for her to open the package, read the note, unwrap the quilt, etc. (Even accounting for my overzealous application of packing tape, this sounded like sufficient time to me as well.)

But after she had signed for the box, she had gone to see to Grandpa. And so, when MIL had called, she had only just gotten out the quilt - and was crying with joy when she came to the phone.

Aw, I think she liked it! :) (What better reaction could you ask for? :))

Really done

Done, note written, everything packed up with foam and packing peanuts and due to be mailed tomorrow. Yay!

The diagonal quilting isn't all that obvious, but if you are curious, I mocked it up (the pale yellow lines) here. The ditch stitching (=quilting in the seam line) isn't supposed to be visible, so the fact that it isn't is a good thing ;)

You know, it's funny... going in, I was kind of dreading doing the ditch stitching, as even little inaccuracies are so obvious. But with all of the ditch stitching I needed to do on this quilt (around each of the photos, between the body of the quilt and the first border, between the grey and brown borders), I started to get fairly comfortable with it. So I am now kind of looking forward to the idea of doing more going forward!

Not quite...

About an inch of one of the quilting threads broke. I saw this suspicious spot when I was doing the binding; and, indeed, that's exactly where it is. It's easy to fix: I can pick out a few inches of stitches in either direction and just stitch that one line. (I'm glad it popped now rather than later as I'm quilting with variegated thread and that'd be hard to reproduce.)

Since I'm already messing with it, I may want to stitch around the photos a bit to stabilize things a bit more. I'll assess in the daylight...

Done?

Current location of grandparents' quilt:



There is no reason this should be a disaster, as I've washed all the fabrics (and even the batting) several times. But please keep your fingers crossed anyway!