Started Quilting Night Howler

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Things are good here. I've been busy and have been getting a lot done. The weather has been pleasant at my house. There have been storms down in Boulder and that area, but unfortunately not more than a few sprinkles up here.

This week I made some really good progress on Night Howler, designed by Art East Quilting Co. This is the quilt I'm making for my great nephew who is due in October. I started by preparing the binding. I always prepare the binding before making the backing to make sure I have the binding fabric that I want. Then I start using leftovers to create the backing.

Night Howler - Backing

This backing is more chaotic and took longer to make that most of my backings because of the pictorial nature of the quilt top. Because of the way the top was made, the leftovers were all odd sized pieces and half-square triangles. So a lot of time was spent adding small bits of fabric to other leftover bits to get pieces that would fit together. The result is pretty chaotic and not very pretty, but I think it's still a lot of fun. While making the backing, I also made progress on one of my leader/ender projects -- Sister's Nine Patch from More Adventures with Leaders and Enders by Bonnie Hunter.

Sister's Nine Patch - Progress Made This Week

It took me three days to piece the backing! Once the backing was done, I proceeded to pin baste the quilt and start the quilting. I decided to do straight-line quilting on this one. 

Night Howler - Quilting Progress

Night Howler - Quilting Close-Up

I really like how the quilting is turning out! I'm not good at keeping my straight line quilting even and straight, even though I use my walking foot, so I'm drawing several lines using a ruler and a yellow chaco liner, then sewing the lines. I like the chaco liner for this because the "pen" uses a wheel to apply the chalk to the quilt so it doesn't push the fabric around like a pencil does when doing the marking. And I've never had trouble getting the chalk out of the quilt when the quilting is finished. The drawback of the chaco liner is that it is just dropping chalk on the fabric so it wipes off fairly easily so you can't mark too much of the quilt before quilting. Even with this, the quilting is going very quickly and I got over half of the quilting finished yesterday. I hope to get the rest of the quilting finished today and the binding sewn to the front of the quilt so I can take this project to my UFO group tomorrow to work on sewing the binding to the back.

I also made some more progress on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. I finished basting the pieces for the final round of the second rosette and started putting them together.

La Passacaglia - Current Progress

The progress is slow, but it's always fun to see the pieces!

Finally, I picked my knitting back up and made some progress on my Kallara shawl designed by Ambah O'Brien.

Kallara

This end of the shawl decreases more slowly than the increase portion of the shawl, so there's still a ways to go before I get this finished, but it's simple knitting so is a nice project for when I need to relax.

Nancy