Dog Park Backing Started

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Things are going well here. We had our first big freeze and it tried to snow but wasn't successful at my house (although we did get snow at higher elevations). Now we're having some warmer days until the next storm comes by. I'm hoping that one will be just rain since I have.a daytime-only quilt retreat this week! But I'm getting my snow tires put on on Wednesday, so I'll be prepared just in case.

This week I started making the backing for my Dog Park quilt designed by Elizabeth Hartman. This is a quilt for my sister who loves dogs and always has dogs playing in her backyard. I finished the piecing of the top a long time ago and had planned to add applique flowers to represent the gardens in her backyard, but I kept putting it off because it was going to be a pain to applique the flowers on the large top and I was a bit afraid of making it look awkward. Then it dawned on me that I can have quilted flowers rather than applique flowers and that might look better. So, I prepared the binding, using a color that is close to the color that I remember for her fence.

Dog Park - Binding

Then I started on the backing using leftover bits from the piecing of the top.

Dog Park - Backing

It's chaotic, as my backs usually are, but I think it'll be cool when it's finished. The big chunk in the center is the entire width of the needed backing, so now I just need to fill in the top and the bottom. Then I'm going to have a longarmer do the quilting. They can do a panto, an allover design or custom, whatever they want as long as there are flowers. 

As usual, while working on the backing I've also been making progress on my Potato Chip leader/ender project. 

Potato Chip Leader/Ender Blocks

It was good that I cut some more light bricks last week, but I need to go through my older scraps and cut some more! I tend to use a lot more medium/dark fabrics than I do light fabrics.

We also had our monthly UFO group meeting this week. I decided to take my Wild Women Don't Get the Blues blocks, designed by Karen K. Stone, to make some more progress on the hand embroidery I'm doing in the centers. I got two more blocks finished this week.

Wild Women Don't Get the Blues

These are slow to finish, but I really like how they are turning out!

Finally, I made some good progress on my second Scarfscape scarf designed by Laura Nelkin.

Scarfscape

I made the mistake of working on this when I was feeling sleepy. I pushed through to get to the end of my current row on the lace edge, then realized that I put the stitches in the wrong order. I was working from a chart and with a chart you work the right-side rows right-to-left and the wrong-side rows left-to-right. I had worked the wrong-side row right-to-left. I had completed 12 rows with 292 stitches per row and I wasn't sure if I had made the mistake on other rows, too, so I decided to just pull out all of the stitching back to where I had picked up stitches along the long edge before starting the lace. I thought that would be easier than carefully unstitching things. After pulling everything out and restitching back to where I had realized the mistake, I realized that I had made another mistake. When repicking up the stitches, I had just picked up the stitches and had not done the "pick up and purl" specified in the instructions. Oops! That meant that I had missed a row which put my right-side lace rows on the wrong side of the scarf and my wrong-side lace rows on the right side of the scarf. I decided that this was an acceptable mistake to leave in. I can always call the reverse stockinette side of the bias strip the right side instead of the wrong side. So, it becomes a design decision on my part!

Nancy