Ribbon Candy

Hi all -

As usual, I've been a bit scattered working on lots of different things lately. Since this is a quilting blog, I'll start with the little bit of quilting I've done. I'm caught up with all of my obligations, so now I'm back to working on my own stuff. The project I chose is my Jacqueline De Jong quilt which I'm currently calling Let the Sun Shine. As a reminder, this is what the top looked like before I started quilting:

I'd also already finished the SID and done some of the background quilting in the blue. I'm basically tackling the quilting as the spirit moves me, with no overall plan. So, the next piece that piqued my interest was the orange "narrow" borders. While I was piecing this quilt, these borders struck me as being too wide and bulky for the rest of the quilt. I thought about redrafting the pattern to make these thinner, but I didn't feel like doing all of that work, especially with one of the borders being round. Instead, I decided to de-emphasize the borders with the quilting. So I started by quilting lines 1/4" from each edge of each border. This was easily done with the feed dogs up using my 1/4" even feed foot. Then I filled the middle channel with ribbon candy. I don't know about you, but it's really fun for me to watch the dense quilting flatten the desired areas of the quilt when using fluffy batting:

My ribbon candy quilting isn't as smooth as I would have liked, but I love the overall effect:

The quilting is much more effective that it looks in the picture, but you might get a better idea of it if you click on the picture to enlarge it. And here is a close-up, in case that helps:

I'm in a bit of a motivational slump so that's all of the quilting I've done lately. But I've gotten a lot of knitting done.

First, I decided to use some bulky yarn that I got on sale. I looked through the patterns on Ravelry and found this hat pattern:

And a nice cowl to go with it:

Of course, poor Lance has to show us how to wear it:

And I made another hat that I decided to mail to a friend:

I loved this pattern and this yarn so I'll probably make a few more of these. It looks blue in the picture, but this hat is actually green.

Finally, I blocked the scarf that I shared with you in my last blog. I'm new to knitting and this is the first time that I've blocked a piece:

It looks SO much nicer blocked! So you don't have to look back, here's what it looked like before the blocking:

Such a difference!

Well, that's it for now. We've had some incredibly wonderful weather lately, but that's ending now. There's a storm just starting up that could dump a bunch of snow, depending on the path it ends up taking. We'll see how it goes.....

Nancy