Monday, February 1, 2016

Sunny Monday . . .

Well the sun is shining outside, but it is still cold and there is still a foot of snow on the ground.  That snow has been here for a couple months now so I am getting close to being "over it".  Whatever good that does.

A little work here on an old table runner.  I made it as one of those easy, simple ones with no pattern that you sew and turn inside out.  There was no batting and the end were to be folded down to make pointed ends with buttons added.  So I did that but looked at it before adding the final buttons part.  I loved the fabric combination but not the design. The outside pattern overpowered that inner print which is what I loved.


So I opened up one end and added some batting and loaded it on my quilting machine.  Of course I had to baste on some muslin top, bottom and sides.  That caused me a little design problem when I quilted that I didn't think about until I was taking them off after I was done.  I had quilted right over the edges so when I unhooked the muslin, it also unhooked some of the quilting stitches near the edges.  Not good!


So I just added a fancy stitch all the way around that secured those loose quilting thread ends and I like the way it looks.


Here is how it looks in the dining room.  I hung one of my other quilts on the wall in there a couple weeks ago and I love the colors all together.  


The quilt on the wall is one of the very first quilts I ever made.  It is from a pattern from the designer, Cheryl Wittmayer.  I think it is over 10 years old and once I had it complete, I gave it to my mom. I used the same fabrics that were in the pattern and part of the fun was in finding all of those fabrics.   When Mom passed last January, I kept it.  She loved it and always bragged about it.  So I know she likes that it is on display again.  

I used the leftovers from that project a couple years later in a round robin with an online group and ended up with another similar quilt that I hung a month ago in our family room.  That online group is long gone but I made lots of quilting friends there. Our house is nine sided so there are no square rooms - this wall is at an angle meeting the fireplace so it really looks slanted.  

I quilted this with lots of thread to create gold ginkgo leaves that floated down over the quilt.  I love it almost as much as the other and the memory of the online group is important in my quilting travels. You can see some of the quilting in the pic below although the binding wasn't all sewn down. It is easy to see what colors make my heart sing.