Pink and Gray Quilt Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! We're having a nice, somewhat rainy day here. It's nice when Mother Nature waters my flower pots for me!

This week I was able to finish the quilting on my pink and gray quilt. Since I'd already applied the binding, this quilt is now finished!

Pink and Gray Quilt - Front

Pink and Gray Quilt - Back

For quilting, I first did stitch-in-the-ditch (SID) between each of the blocks. I was able to do this with my walking foot, so that was quick and easy. Then I did SID quilting inside the frame of each block using dark gray thread for the dark gray frames and light gray thread for the light gray frames. I started doing this using a ruler to keep my lines straight, but I had a lot of trouble keeping the stitching on the seam so I switched to doing that stitching free motion and was much happier with that result. Finally, I stitched a motif inside each square using a curved ruler and pink thread.

Pink and Gray Quilt - Quilting Motif

Pink and Gray Quilt - Curved Ruler

The length of this ruler made it very difficult to align things under the sewing machine and then to maneuver the quilt, but I got it done. It's not perfect, but I think it still looks good!

We had our monthly UFO small group meeting this week. A lot of people were able to make it so I decided to do handwork there to leave more room for others using sewing machines. This was a good opportunity to start doing the hand embroidery on my Wild Women Don't Get the Blues blocks designed by Karen K. Stone.

Wild Women Don't Get the Blues - Hand Applique

I'm randomly chosing the colors and the stitches. Originally, I was going to have some blocks with circles and some without (so with grids or scattered stitches), but after embroidering these four blocks I think I will have a circle motif in each block. I think it adds a nice coherence. But I will be varying the size of the circle in the blocks. I'm going to lightly embroider all of the blocks, then decide if more embroidery is needed. I'm guessing I'll want to keep the embroidery light, but we'll see....

We also had our monthly English Paper Piecing (EPP) small group meeting this week. It was a fun meeting, as usual, but a little more fun this month because we celebrated the birthday of one of the group members. She has celiac disease so our host's husband made a gluten-free chocolate cake. He used a King Arthur cake mix and I wanted to share it because it was incredible. Nobody, myself included, would have guessed that it was gluten-free! It was moist and tasty -- the perfect chocolate cake. I'm guessing it was the mix here, but only know that it was King Arthur and was gluten-free. I highly recommend this cake mix! Anyway, I continued to work on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein.  Since I usually just work on this quilt at the monthly meeting, the progress is slow but I'm loving the results! This week I finished the yellow round and started the blue and gray round.

La Passacaglia

This is the second large rosette in the quilt. I haven't started any of the small rosettes yet. This one is now too big to fit in my project bag without folding, so I think I'll try to finish it at home and then start the next large rosette at our next meeting. That way I don't have to carry around my huge project bag that I made large enough to hold the large rosettes without folding. It's a nice bag for storing the project, but not very convenient for travel.

I also pulled fabric for my great nephew's quilt this week. He is due in September or October so I have plenty of time. I found a pattern I liked at the quilt shop when we met there for our cross-stitch group a couple of weeks ago. (I'm going to try to buy something from the shop every time we meet to thank them for letting us meet there for free.) So I went through my stash this week and pulled fabrics for the top. I'll be making Night Howler designed by Art East Quilting Co. 

Night Howler

I like the color scheme that they used in the pattern, but decided to use patterned fabrics rather than solids. I looked through my stash and found fabrics that I think will work well. Week after next I'll be attending a three-day daytime-only retreat. I'll probably piece this quilt there. Then I'll have plenty of time to think about the quilting.

Finally, I also made more progress on my Kallara shawl designed by Ambah O'Brien. 

Kallara

I've made it past the widest part of the shawl and am now starting the decreases. It decreases more slowly than it increased so I'm probably about a third finished with this shawl.

Nancy