A Little Bit of Love Finished and Posted

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Fall is definitely in the air around here. I noticed this morning that the aspen lining the road into our neighborhood are starting to turn. The aspen on my property are still green, but they should follow suit soon! I've noticed that the trees along the road always turn first. A neighbor told me that this is because of the chemicals they put on the road. I'm not sure if that's true, especially since our neighborhood roads are dirt, but it's possible. I wonder if it might not be from the car exhaust. But, either way, they are starting to turn and they're beautiful! I'll try to remember to get pictures of my tress when they start turning.

This week turned out much differently than I had planned. I was supposed to go to a guild sew day for making charity quilts on Thursday, then there was a retreat on Friday and Saturday. But, unfortunately, my dog ended up breaking her toenail on Tuesday so she was on restricted activity all week and couldn't go to daycare. A broken toenail sounds minor to us, but when. it happens to a dog it's a problem because their quick is exposed and it's very painful. So I spent the week in the house with a 1.5 year old dog who was a bundle of energy. I ended up letting her go outside on her own a day early! But she's completely fine now and is very happy to have her freedom again! But I was still able to get a lot done this week....

My big finish was the tiny quilt that I was making for my great-niece who is due in November. It's from the "Baby's Love Blanket" pattern in the Quick Quilts for Kids book by Elizabeth Keevill. I was able to sandwich it, quilt it and add the binding this week. Here is the finished quilt:

A Little Bit of Love front

A Little Bit of Love back

I did minimal quilting on this quilt because I want it to remain soft and comfy. I did stitch-in-the-ditch (SID) on all of the seams in invisible thread. Then I quilted around the applique hearts and added "ghost" hearts in the empty green squares using fuchsia thread. That should be enough to hold everything together and still be cute. I wanted to share a close-up of the pink and white fabric that looks a little out of place in the quilt, at least to my eye:

A Little Bit of Love close-up

Can you see what it is??? Candy necklaces! Don't you love it?? I just had to include it!! I decided not to put a label on this quilt because it's so small and hopefully will get so much use that it gets worn out. I was able to get to the store this morning to get a card and got the quilt packaged up and mailed to my sister. It should arrive before the shower, which is on Saturday 9/14.

I also made progress on the bigger baby quilt. This one is the "Little Elephant" pattern from Lickety-Split Quilts for Little Ones by Laura Bevan. I was able to piece together the backing:

Little Elephant backing

I just randomly sewed together a bunch of the scraps to use some of them up. I think it will look cute once the quilt is quilted and the back is trimmed so that there isn't so much empty space around the edges. And this morning I was able to get it sandwiched and pin basted. I decided to do the pinning out on the deck on a couple of little folding tables I have. They were almost big enough when I pushed the two tables together:

Little Elephant pin basted

Of course it started sprinkling while I was pinning the first section so I quickly finished that section and took my stuff inside. That caused the rain to stop, so I waited a little while and was then able to finish the pinning. I hope to start the quilting tomorrow. I plan to do SID around the parts of the elephant using matching thread so that I get a ghosted elephant image on the back. I'm not sure what I'll do for the rest of the quilting yet. I usually figure out the quilting as I go along.

I was also able to spend some time knitting my Festival of Stitches shawl designed by Lisa Hannes. I was able to finish the last section on each side and bind everything off:

Festival of Stitches

Festival of Stitches final sections

I still need to bury the ends, block the shawl and make a tassel. I'm not sure how I feel about this last section of the shawl. The previous section is lace, which is designed to be stretched during blocking to show the detail, but the final section is ribbing that is designed to shrink up. But no matter how it turns out, it will still keep me wam in the winter!

Finally, I made more progress on my English Paper Piecing (EPP) hexagon charm quilt. When I started this quilt years ago, I was piecing the hexagons together into larger hexagon-shaped units. The hexagon-shaped units do all fit together, but I realized that it's confusing to put them together and my final qiult will be rectangular so my units should probably be rectangular, too, to make things easier down the line. So, I've started adding hexagons to my hexagon-shaped units to make the new rectangular units. Here are the two units side-by-side:

EPP Hexagon Charm Quilt unit transition

This change almost doubles the size of the units. I finished the first two units:

EPP Hexagon Charm Quilt rectangular units

You can see how much easier it is to fit these units together into a rectangle! I had 26 of the hexagon-shaped units finished, so I "just" have 24 units to go..... This is going to take a lot of hexagons, so I basted a bunch more to draw from:

EPP Hexagon Charm Quilt - new basted hexagons

I'll just keep plugging away at this long-term project....

That's it for this week. It feels good to be making progress on some of these projects!

Nancy