…..has been spent putting binding on the Flower Pot quilt and watching a couple of videos that I bought from Quilting Arts…..

I have five quilts that need to be ready for Show Receiving on Thursday…..

MUST….STITCH…..FASTER!!!!!

The plan for yesterday was to get the Flower Pot quilting finished.  I was in a bit of a hurry because a couple of the fabrics had bled a little bit when I sprayed the top with water to see how the quilting looked without the blue lines. So, I wanted to get it finished quickly and get it in to soak.

I was going along well with just two straight lines in the border to finish it off.  I had the brainstorm of using a strip of masking tape to mark the lines so that I could sew along the edge…..

So, as I was quilting the last line I realized that the tape was causing a small pucker in the top.  Well, I couldn’t let there be a pucker, so I grabbed my seam ripper to slice the masking tape…..and then it happened…..

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

I looked at it for a while and decided to try to patch it and quilt over it……

Nope…that looks terrible.

Instead I spent the next two hours  taking out three lines of quilting (about 30 inches worth), piecing together bits of the border fabric to make a strip long enough and re-inserting the border.

Finally…..it was finished!!!

I drew a bath of warm water, added some Synthrapol and a few color catcher sheets and pitched the quilt in.  The water turned a light purple but the color catchers did their job and the color didn’t migrate to other areas of the quilt.  After a short soak, I drained the water and started over again with cool water. 

The quilt was moved to the washer for a spin cycle and then into the dryer for a bit to remove more of the water.

Then it was back upstairs where I moved some furniture in the guest sitting room and was able to lay out the quilt to finish drying.  It is so nice to have a bit of room for this!!!

All that is left is to square it up, add the binding, sleeve and label.

Cant wait to have it finished!!!!

This afternoon I hobbled upstairs to start quilting on the blocks of the Flower Pot Quilt.  As I looked at them and thought about it, I decided to do non-organic quilting in the blocks so am working with straight lines that will hopefully look like they are behind the fancy flowers…..

So far so good……

On Thursday,  I was able to get rid of one of my crutches which made it MUCH easier to climb the stairs to my studio.  So, I have been spending a few hours each day working on the quilting for the Flower Pot Quilt.

I was very unsure about how I was going to quilt this piece and still am not sure about the blocks, but had a good idea about the border.  When we were talking about it, my friend Deb had commented that she was looking forward to seeing some “organic” designs in the quilting.   So I chanted the word “organic” and off I went…..

I am working the borders in a mixture of echo quilting and other “organic”  shapes…..

The only problem was that, after quilting one border, I ran out of thread on the spool……

This morning I made a quick trip to the shop and now have plenty of thread to do the job. 

As of this evening, all of the borders are finished and I am trying to get some idea of what to do inside the blocks.

If nothing else, it has been great to be upstairs again!!!!

On Monday, I planned to get the backing ready so that I could start quilting on the Flower Pot quilt.  Since I didn’t have any fabric pieces that were big enough for the back, I decided that I would piece one together.

I initially wanted an accent strip so made a stripe using strips from my 2-1/2 inch drawer along with some from a Jelly Roll that I bought long ago…..

OK….good start.

Next I found some samples that I had made when I was teaching a mini class on using Elmer’s Glue as a dye resist.  The class had to be postponed and never was rescheduled so I still had all of the samples….

I spent about an hour washing out the glue (it had REALLY dried in the past 3 years and took a lot of soaking and scrubbing) and getting the fabric ready to use. 

Then I started adding different lengths of fabric, trying to come up with a pleasing arrangement.   Here is the final……

I am not SUPER happy with it, but at least, after SIX hours, it is finished!!!!

I spent some time online looking at other quilter’s backs and think that my main problem is that I tried to use too many different fabrics.  It would have been better for me to have one or two much larger pieces, and only have one or two “accent” pieces.  

That realization also means that I need to start buying larger pieces of fabric when I see ones that are good for backs.

On with the quilting…….