Thanksgiving feather

I got up LATE, yea! After breakfast I did all the prep possible for my two vegetable dishes, creating the good smells of bacon (for the green beans), then onions saute-ing. Now everything is packed and ready to go to the Miller house on The Lake (Lake Michigan), where I certainly hope the smell of turkey is in the air.

Therefore I sat down to the next step of my machine quilting---a border feather. YIKES!

Well, I couldn't think of anything else to fill the space. I sketched the center line, and marked the width of the edges to avoid. And this is it for the first one.
Can't get the "repeat" lines to fall on top of each other a good deal of the time. I need to get away and breathe for an hour!
Then it will be time to change clothes and go. So no more until this evening, or tomorrow.

So much to be thankful for--a heated house, no real hunger, good health in all but minor matters, a more racially tolerant country.
And our family and friends.

Slow down and enjoy each bite!

Sara

Border feathers on CC Leftovers

Last evening worked on the feathers in the border of this little quilt.

I used a purchased stencil to draw the center line weaving back and forth. After sewing that line, I just made up each loop as I went along. Luckily I have seen some famous quilter's methods in books or videos. Some of them don't seem to go for the precise-type of feather, but a more natural look, giving me permission to "do my own thing". Where I meant to trace back over an already quilted line, I frequently missed. However, this border fabric is great at concealing black thread. Not an intentional choice, but a good one!

And here is a view of the back. I now see that I "should" have made the feathers more "open" so that the quilting in the border wasn't denser than the quilting in the middle of the piece. Not going to change it now, but something to remember next time.

Right now I'm glad that I went ahead and DID it. The piece is done, and I have some more experience in free motion quilting.

It's bound and in the wash with this week's sheets.

Sara

"Free" motion?

I decided that those pesky empty squares in the middle of each block needed to be filled with something.

Since I have been calling the not-star block the "Ring" block, I thought its circularity would be enhanced with a circle in the middle. I looked around the kitchen for a can or something the right size (not going out to the edges so as to be more visible), and came up with a pill bottle. I drew around it with one of those blue pens that have ink that disappears in water. Then I "free" motion quilted on the circles. Lots of stops and starts as the circles are far from each other.

I decided on a square for the middle of the Star blocks, but how to make a square square in "free" motion?

I decided to cut a recipe card to what looked like the right size square, and then try to follow around the edge of it. First I found that a regular glass headed pin was TOO long, and caught on the darning foot and messed everything up. So I found a short pin that had come in a recent new dress shirt for Charlie. That worked fine!

I sewed the card to the quilt a couple of times going around the corners, and some of the straight lines weren't very straight. But I got better as I went along.

Now I only have one quarter of the quilt left. Tomorrow I will layer that and pin it and stitch in the ditch, and do these circles and squares. Then sew the last pieces together. After that I'll think about borders.

Sara

Gratitudes:

Decisions about quilting finished

Coffee time with Ray and Dianne

My sweetie pie