Lake House Romance SID Done

Hi all -

Well, I've finally finished the stitch-in-the-ditch quilting on my Lake House Romance quilt. Whew! That was a lot of work! But, in the end, well worth the effort. Since I used invisible thread on the front, you can't see much difference there except that it's a little less baggy than it was before:

But I like to use colored thread on the back so you can see the new quilting there:

It's hard to see in the pictures, but on the back of the quilt I wanted to have green thread for all of the SID around the green squares, and blue thread for the remaining SID which would just be on the outside of the blue blocks. To do the green SID, I used the following stitch path:

I used this path for a couple of reasons. First, whenever I have quilting lines that need to connect, like they do at the corners where the green squares meet, I like to cross my lines rather than try to get them to touch because I hate the look you get when they don't quite meet. I hope that makes sense.My second reason for using this quilt path was that it required less rotating of the big, heavy quilt. With this path, I was able to quilt 4" before having to turn the quilt 90 degrees for the next line. Of course, you have to be very careful when quilting lines that cross each other or you'll end up with puckers on the back. To reduce this problem, I quilt with my hands making a triangle around the needle and pull the fabric down a bit with my thumbs to keep things flat. I wish I could show you a picture of this, but I don't have a way of holding the camera while doing this.

For the blue SID quilting, I had to use this more difficult path:

 With this stitch path, I had to rotate the quilt 90 degrees after every 2" of quilting. Not fun! But it was necessary for the look I wanted on the back.

Since the blue SID quilting was so tiring, I took a couple of days off this week to do some knitting. Every 10 years or so, I get the bug to learn to knit again. I always seem to do it just long enough to get the hang of it a bit, but not enough to make it second nature for me. We'll see how it goes this time! To get started again, I went to Stefanie Japel's Knit Lab class on Craftsy. I thought this was a wonderful class and I really enjoyed the class project, which is the Lacy Keyhole Scarf. Here is my first try at this scarf:

 The scarf is actually a purple color that is in between the picture of the whole scarf and the detail shots of the ends. It's definitely not perfect, but I do really like how it turned out. Here's what it will look like when worn:

 I bought a couple of other yarns and thought I could make one of these scarves for each of my nieces.

Well, I'd better get back to work on my Lake House Romance quilt. Right now I'm quilting the straight lines through the centers of the blue squares. That goes pretty quickly so I should have that finished today. Then I can start working on the feathered hearts.

Hope you're having a great week!

Nancy