Japanese Garden Top Finished

Hi all -

Spring is in the air today and I'm really enjoying the longer days! It was overcast and cold yesterday with a little bit of snow, but today is bright and sunny and the temperature is up to 45 at my house. I love this time of year!

I finally got back to my niece's wedding quilt, Japanese Garden. I deviated a bit from the pattern so ended up having to order some fabric for the outer border. All of the pieces that I had in the right color were too small. Luckily, I found the right color online and it arrived a couple of days ago. Here is the quilt top with the borders attached:

You can see about 2/3 of the quilt in the picture. The top is a repeat of the bottom row. I really like how it turned out! The quilt top ended up being 99.5" x 99.5", so it's a good size. I've just barely started working on the quilt back. I found a panel that I think is perfect for the back, so  I started by putting a border around the panel:

The colors are brighter in person than they are in the picture. The panel itself is 40" tall, so it will make up a good part of the backing. I want it to be offset a bit towards the upper left corner of the back, then will fill in the rest of the back with whatever I feel like sewing. It should be a lot of fun!

I've also been doing some knitting. I finished the knitting on my Aller shrug by Laura Nelkin:

If I could just get myself to block it, maybe I could start wearing it.... If you haven't noticed, I really hate blocking things. But I'll try to get this done tomorrow.

Another finished knitting project that needs to be blocked is my Fraser's Ridge shawl by Rachel Roden:

I followed the pattern for this, except I knit the lace on the edge (at the top of the photo) in the main orange yarn rather than in the gray mohair that the pattern called for. I did this because it was the bright orange that really drew me to this shawl and I wanted to put a little bit more of it in. I hope to get this blocked tomorrow, too!

I also received and completed my next Lola's Choice kit, which was the Presto Cowlo by Laura Nelkin:

One of the nice things about these small kits is that I usually don't block them! This was also the perfect project for my favorite model:

(I was supposed to take a picture of him in my Aller for a good friend of mine, but there were too many yarn ends hanging off of it since I don't do the final trimming of the ends until after blocking. Sorry!)

I also got and completed the February installment of my shawl club project, Coral Coast Wrap by Ambah O'Brien:

There are a lot of months left before this one is done!

On the sewing side, I made some small pet beds for the Humane Society of the Pike's Peak Region:

This was one of the March projects for the Relief Crafters of America Facebook group.

Finally, I've also made some more progress on my mom's cross stitch:

The trees on the right have been taking shape since my last picture.

That's about it for crafting. I did take a picture of Wesley this morning when I was photographing my niece's quilt. He decided to climb on an old fence post behind the quilt and was looking mighty cute!

I'll try to get more pictures of the pets into my blogs. They are so cute, but I usually don't have a camera handy to capture what they're doing!

Well, that's about it for now. I was hoping to be watching my favorite basketball tournaments now, but they were all canceled with the pandemic. Definitely the right decision, but a personal disappointment. Oh, well. Hopefully everyone will be careful and we get through this soon!

Stay healthy!

Nancy