Sunday, June 21, 2020

Quarantine Quilting

    It’s been three years since I posted on this blog and it took me a bit to even recall HOW to post (don’t count your chickens, it’s not posted yet). I thought of the blog in the first place mostly because I was working on a quilt project from the past (WAY past) and I wanted to know when it was that I started it. I knew I had posted a few times about working on it because it was sort of following along with a group that was doing New York Beauties, so I started poking around. Turns out that it was April of 2012 that I started the project. This is the original post. Well, I finished 16 blocks at the time and it hung on the design wall unfinished for 8 years while I got my MAT and started teaching high school - that was pretty much the end of regular blog posting. 
    Of course, this spring everything was turned upside-down with the stay-at-home order and teaching classes from home and generally not going anywhere.  Like many, I have had more time at home than usual. I spent some time organizing the sewing room, filing and sorting fabric, and due to this strange new world, making masks with some of that cute ‘orphan’ fabric not suited to other planned projects. I also have been working on some of those old projects, including the one that was still hanging on the design wall that I mentioned above. It now has its borders and has been quilted. The irony is that the borders themselves required 12 MORE NYB blocks in a tiny size that I had to draft the patterns for myself. I guess I remembered how to do it alright (actually came up with a new system for organizing all the tiny paper pieced parts that works great) because I think they turned out rather well. The next task will be to make and apply the binding. 
Back on the design wall after quilting because I am used to seeing it there by now! 

This was while I was marking the quilting lines

This is the back of the quilt with the label. It is interesting what you will resort to when trying to use up some of the yardage in the original set of fabrics for this quilt, in this case a set of Quilters Candy semi- solids. 

This stormy blue and grey and sea green lovely is a quilt top I put together from a set of fabric I set aside even longer ago when I made an identical baby quilt (for a kid that has likely graduated college by now) I always loved the quilt and wanted to make another just like it. When I was going through fabrics stacks In April I found the set and the printed panel and figured it was about time.  I have no babies in my life at the moment to make it for, but I finished the top, made the backing and binding and they are all hanging together in the closet with all my other flimsies, awaiting the right occasion for quilting. 


I have many more projects on that to do list. Maybe I will keep a record of things I am working on, as an once did, so that when I finally get around to finishing them I will have a place to go look up what dates to include on the label!