Oak Leaves Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! I had a quiet holiday at home and was able to finish my quilt for my brother-in-law. It feels so good to have everything done! This year the family decided to do a Secret Santa Christmas, so that's the only gift I have to make. It's been nice not to have the pressure of having to make so many gifts!

As I mentioned, I was able to finish my Oak Leaves quilt this week:

Oak Leaves

I love how it turned out, even though the quilting is far from perfect! If you look closely at the photo, you will see that the quilt has that scrunchy, soft finish. I don't usually wash quilts before gifting them because I love the crisp feel of a new, unwashed quilt and I want the recipient to enjoy that feeling, too. But I used a thick wash-away stabilizer for the applique and I wanted to soak out that stiffness before gifting the quilt. To remove the stabilizer, I soaked the quilt in the tub and periodically agitated it to help the stabilizer dissolve. Then I moved the quilt to the washer and ran it through a light soil cycle. I had put a sheet under the quilt when I put it in the tub so I wouldn't have to worry about the weight of the water distorting the quilt when I moved it to the washer. It all worked really well! For the quilting in the brown squares, I used a ruler to quilt straight lines emphasizing half square triangle nature of the log cabin blocks.

Oak Leaves - Quilting

While this was an easy quilting design, I found that I kept quilting the lines to the wrong end points. When your nose is that close to the quilt, it's really hard to distinguish the vertices! I spent a lot of time removing errant lines, and I made the decision to leave some in that I didn't think anyone would notice but me! Another thing I realized after doing several blocks is that the two possible diagonals of the brown-only squares are not the same and it's hard to see which diagonal is the one that matches the diagonal in the half and half squares. By the end of the quilting, I was doing a lot of marking to keep myself on track! But, like I said, I think it looks good and nobody will notice the problems but me. I used a Quilter's Select ruler to do the straight line quilting:

Quilter's Select Ruler

I purchased this ruler several years ago when they first came out, but had never used it before. It is a really nice ruler! Quilter's Select rulers have a kind of sticky backing designed to reduce slipping. They have this coating on both their rotary cutting rulers and their quilting rulers. I find that this coating works really well! I didn't have any problem with this ruler slipping through all of this quilting, regardless of what awkward position I had things in to do the quilting. These rulers are, however, fairly expensive. But I will still keep my eyes open for sales on these rulers and pick up some other shapes when I have the opportunity.

When the quilt was done, I dug through my collection of Christmas fabrics and I made a gift bag for it:

Oak Leaves - Gift Bag

This is a bigger gift bag, so the cording I've used in the past for smaller gift bags seemed too light for this bag, so I've ordered some 3/4" red ribbon that I will run through the casing and tie in a bow to hold the bag closed. In the past, I've spent a lot of time making very polished gift bags that were lined with a slick lining fabric and had all of the fabrics stabilized. I decided that this gift bag would probably not get much use in the future and I didn't want to spend that much time on the gift bag or make it as heavy, so I simplified my process. I decided not to use any lining and instead used an overlock stitch on my machine to finish the raw edges on the inside of the bag to prevent fraying. I also didn't use any stabilizer. I thought about sewing some handles, like you would have on a tote bag, to make it easier to carry the bag, but decided that would look funny and would be overkill. I made a similar gift bag for the Baby Elephant quilt:

Baby Elephant - Gift Bag

So now I'm completely ready for Christmas!

During my TV time (it's NFL and college basketball season!), I've continued to work on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

I continue to love working on this shawl! It's so squishy and the colors are so beautiful! The first part of this shawl has really gone swiftly, but things are slowing down as the rows get longer and longer. Each row is now over 300 stitches long! Good thing I'm enjoying it!!

I hope everyone is enjoying their winter (although it's not officially winter yet...) and things aren't too stressful getting ready for the holidays!

Nancy