Started Quilting Modern Flowers Baby Quilt

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Time sure is flying by! Can you believe we're over half way done with September??? We even have rain possibly mixed with snow forecast for this Tuesday! We've been getting a lot of short rain showers recently which has been great for keeping the fire season at bay. No fires anywhere near us yet this season. Gotta love that!!

I've continued to work on the baby quilt for my great niece who is due in November. It's a modern flower quilt design based on a post in the Bernina WeAllSew blog. I love to add interest to the back of a quilt by piecing it from the leftover fabrics from the front. I love the fun this adds to the quilt. And my niece once said that she loves my pieced backings, too, so I wanted to make sure to make this quilt back interesting! I also had some leftover stabilizer pieces that I cut for the applique on the front, so I wanted to add applique to the back using these. Here's what I ended up doing for the back:

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Backing

It's a little crazy, but I love it! Now I was ready to start the quilting. I mentioned before that I was thinking about dividing the quilt into random polygons and quilting each with a different background fill. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. For this design, it was important that the lines dividing up the quilt be as straight as possible, so I needed to mark the lines on the quilt front before doing the basting.

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Marking the Lines

I taped the quilt top to the floor before drawing the lines to make sure that everything would be straight. I used a very long ruler to draw the initial line, then used a shorter ruler that also has measurements marked to draw another line 1/4" away from the first. Then I added more lines in places that looked pleasing to my eye. I drew the lines disregarding the applique even though I won't be quilting the lines over the applique to make things easier for me to see. I also crossed out the little lines that appear where the long lines intersect to remind myself while I'm quilting to not quilt there.

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Close-Up of Markings

Now I was ready to baste the quilt. I tend to have the best luck with pin basting. So I got back down on the floor and pinned the heck out of the quilt. I started the quilting by quilting all of the dividing lines and quilting around all of the applique shapes that touch the lines.

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Lines Quilted

Modern Flowers Baby Quilt - Close-Up of Quilting

Now I can start choosing background fills and filling in the different areas. I'll quilt around the rest of the applique shapes while doing the background quilting.

In the evenings I've been working hard on the Scarfscape scarf designed by Laura Nelkin. This is the second project in this year's N Club. 

Scarfscape

I've made some really good progress on this project this week. The white marker shows where I was in my last blog post, so I've completed most of the border lace this week.

Scarfscape - Close-Up

I've been really looking forward to getting to the orange section of the yarn, and now I'm there! The pattern is designed so that you make the most of your skein of yarn. So, when getting near the end you start weighing your yarn after each wrong-side row and when you have a certain amount left you move to the final rows and the bind off. I'm to that point now, so the end is in sight! I wish I could somehow put the feeling of the yarn in this post. It feels light as a cloud and so incredibly soft while doing the knitting! That makes it a little harder to knit since it can slide around on the needles, but I keep imagining how wonderful it'll feel around my neck when it's finished! 

Nancy