Hooray for Shop Hops!

Even though I’m trying to continue a “fabric diet,” since I have way too much fabric as it is, I’m planning a mini shop hop for tomorrow when I’m off work.  I do not intend to purchase fabric, (unless of course it’s absolutely irresistable and non-negotiable, or on sale!) but I’m on the lookout for some batting and some threads.

Every year, my mom and I go on the Eastern Pennsylvania Quilt Shop Hop, which sends us to 12 shops.  Participants buy a “passport” for $5 at any participating shop, which comes with a block kit and coupons for return trips after the shop hop ends.  If you get your passport stamped at each of the 12 participating shops and turn it in at the final one, you are entered into a drawing for some fairly fabulous prizes, including a sewing machine, a $1000 shopping spree, and a hand quilted queen size quilt.  Even if you don’t make it to all the shops, there are door prizes, refreshments, and special sales, as well as different block kits at each shop for a block using that year’s selected shop hop fabrics.  A highlight for me is always seeing the different quilts each shop makes with the same blocks; I take pictures at each shop and basically have a textbook on different ways to set sampler blocks.  Plus, it’s an excuse for me to spend time with my mom, running around to a bunch of shops and having a ball.

2009 Shop Hop Quilt, Endless Mountains Quiltworks

We never would have found out about the town of Tunkhannock, PA, had not the excellent shop there, Endless Mountains Quiltworks, been on the hop.  Every year I look forward not only to seeing owner Jeannette’s lovely shop, but also seeing the gorgeous fall colors and spectacularly maintained Victorian architecture of the town — and lunch at the delightful Patsel’s restaurant in Clark’s Summit afterward!  We now also attend the annual Airing of the Quilts there the first Saturday in October, which has grown to encompass not only the original community outdoor quilt exhibit but also an indoor guild show, a one-woman show by a local quilter at the Catholic church, quilt-related performances at the local Dietrich Theater, and a trolley ride.

The Airing of the Quilts

Shop hopping on an unofficial, casual basis is always a fun thing to do with friends.  Rhonda, Diane and I hit several of the southern Pennsylvania / northern Maryland shops on a quilting weekend in August, including Needle & Thread in Gettysburg, Sisto’s and Needles & Pins in Frederick, Patches in Mt. Airy, and Seminole Sampler in Catonsville.  It’s particularly exciting to have a specific project to collect fabrics and supplies for as you go from shop to shop, and to have friends along to help with the decision-making process.

Tomorrow, my primary destination is The Quilter’s Palette in Fleetwood so I can use my gift certificate prize from “Kyoto Ink,” then I’ll go over to Ladyfingers in Oley and Wooden Bridge Drygoods in Kutztown.  If time allows, I’ll swing by Sauder’s and/or Burkholder’s in Denver, PA  on my way home.  Hopefully, among all those shops, I’ll be able to find the wool batting I’d like to use in “Ruby Wedding.”  It’s a great big quilt, 90″ square, and several of the wool battings I’ve been able to find described online are only 90-93″ wide, so if I can’t find something at least 96″ wide, I’ll have to rethink using wool.  I’ve been wanting to use wool for a while based on learning Diane Gaudynski has switched to it exclusively.  Supposedly it creates a lot more loft than cotton while being much easier to machine quilt with than polyester.  On one hand, I’m hesitant to use an unknown product on a quilt of this importance; on the other hand, if the results are as fabulous as reported, I’d hate to pass them by.  I know I should try it out on a smaller/lesser quilt first, and perhaps I will, but ultimately, wool deserves to be slept under.  I’ll have to see if I can find an unfinished quilt top that needs to be quilted fairly simply.  I might have one or two of those lying around somewhere.

But back to shop hops as a concept:  quilting is such a tactile pursuit that I can’t entirely embrace online shopping.  I need to pet the fabric before I buy it, and I can only do that in person.  Besides, I love quilt shops and want to do what I can to support and celebrate their continued existence.  The recession has not been kind to small businesses; several shops I know and once frequented have closed in the last two years.  The following statistics were passed along to me by a guild friend:

The percentage of the money you spend that stays in the local community if you shop at:

– a local quilt shop:  68%

– a big national chain:  43%

– an internet retailer:  0%

There are fewer shops local to me than there used to be, and no one shop can carry everything each local quilter needs, let alone everything we might want to see.  So rather than turning to the internet or catalogs, I’m going on a little shop hop.  Especially after having been so recently cooped up due to snow, it may be just what the doctor ordered.

Hooray for Retreats!

(I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this topic, but suffice to say that ever since Boing Boing pointed me toward Gretchen Rubin’s “The Happiness Project”, I’ve thought about making happiness, my own and that of my family, friends, and coworkers, the subject of my Lenten efforts for this year.  Quilting makes me happy, but I’ve spent too much time here already talking about the anxiety- and guilt-ridden aspects of it.  Without turning into Pollyanna, I wanted to make sure I also made some unmitigatedly optimistic posts here.  The subject for the first one presented itself immediately.)

Ruby Wedding top: FINISHED!!! 2/20/10

I’m back from my EGA retreat; I had a great time, as always.  Retreats are an amazingly productive experience for me because it’s such a completely supportive environment to work in.  I don’t have children, and I’m frequently home by myself, so some would wonder why on earth I would pay money to have to pack my clothes and all my supplies, hoping I didn’t accidentally leave anything crucial at home 45 minutes away, to sleep on a strange bed and sit in a room for a weekend, doing exactly the same hobbies that I could have done at home for free.  Yet at least three times a year, I do exactly that.  Here’s why:

1)  Focus:  Most people can certainly understand why women with children living at home like coming to the occasional retreat; it’s basically a vacation from the normal demands of a family, where one can concentrate on pursuing hobbies that one doesn’t always have time for.  But what about the rest of us?  Why would we want to work on a folding table under fluorescent lights when we have perfectly good studios at home?  For me, it comes down to focus.  Even if there are no other humans making demands on my time, when I’m in my own home, the house itself pulls at me.  I should be doing laundry, or organizing the mail, or sweeping the kitchen floor.  Even if I manage to resist the siren call of housework (which I somehow find the fortitude to do on a far-too-regular basis) there are all the alternate distractions:  books, magazines, TV, the phone, the internet, dozens of little pastimes that seem innocuous one by one but can collectively whittle down a full open day of opportunity into a few frantic minutes.  At retreat, I’m wearing blinders.  All I have is what I brought with me, and despite the welcome and inevitable socializing, eating, and show-and-tell, I can concentrate on my work to the exclusion of everything else.

2)  Inspiration:  The best thing about retreat is that it places me in a roomful of people who get it.  We may not all be friends; in some cases we’ve never even met, but we share a common bond in that we all find quilting or needlework or rubber stamping or what have you to be important enough to our senses of self that we’re taking an entire weekend out of our busy lives to devote to it.  Being in that sort of environment is different from any other aspect of my life; I imagine it to be analogous to an immigrant’s gathering with others who hail from the same country.  Here are people who share my culture and speak my language, and I don’t have to explain my points of reference.  Just breathing the air at retreat seems to ignite a passion for my hobbies, because I get to see the enthusiasm that others bring to it and the beautiful things they create.

3)  Cooperation:  Having other people near me who are interested in what I’m doing creates some accountability to actually do it.   (This is also, in part, why I’m a member of guilds and why I write this blog.)  Having company and entertainment also helps me get through the tedious and awkward parts that I might use as an excuse to go downstairs and get sidetracked if I encountered them at home.  Fellow retreat-goers are also a great sounding board when I run into trouble or just encounter a conundrum in a project — in fact, they’ll frequently weigh in whether I want them to or not!  Seriously, the best way to get at least three-quarters of the attendees at a quilt retreat to surround you is to put a set of blocks up on a design wall, stand back with your arms crossed, and stare.  The value of that many sets of eyes when trying to get a set of scrap blocks properly arranged is absolutely beyond measure.

As shown at the top of the post, I brought along “Ruby Wedding” and spent the first several hours I was at the retreat completing the applique.  It’s exhilarating and gratifying to have that huge top finished, but I’m a little terrified to quilt it.  More on that later.  I also worked toward finishing a cross stitch project I had worked on at least 5-6 years ago.  I had cross stitched and beaded a set of Nativity figures designed by Mill Hill and had planned to finish them as stuffed stand-up figures I could display on my mantel at Christmastime, but then left them languishing in a ziploc bag in the basement.  This weekend, I assembled and stuffed them.

Cross Stitch Nativity

I only got the twisted cording trim attached to the Holy Family figure; I still have eight figures to go.  Now that I’ve finished the applique on “Ruby Wedding,” this may need to be my handwork project until they’re complete.  As I said in the title, Hooray for Retreats!

Progress Report 2/18/10

As ridiculous amounts of snow continue to hamper my normal going-places lifestyle, I’m trying to make the most of the situation by getting some quilting in.  Not only did I finish all the border half-blocks for “Taupe Winding Ways,” thus finishing the piecing for that quilt nearly five years after I started it, but I also assembled the upper half of the quilt top:

TWW w/ border

It’s very gratifying to see that first of all, it really does look as good as I had initially imagined way back when, and secondly, that my curved piecing skills were pretty solid from the earliest blocks.  I was concerned that there would be an obvious quality gradient from the first blocks to the most recent ones, but while I definitely got faster and more consistent with experience, I was enough of a perfectionist with this project all along that the differences aren’t obvious.

I’ve also been working on the applique to finish the border corners on my parents’ “Ruby Wedding” quilt.  Trying to do decent-looking hand applique on a queen-size quilt top is not particularly pleasant.  I’m holding myself to the same standards of stitch size and invisibility while trying to maneuver this giant weighty bulk that doesn’t let me keep the left-hand grasp where I want it.  I learned hand applique largely from the Piece o’Cake DVD, so I really emphasize the position of my left thumb as the determinant of how long my stitches are and where they come out. I should probably ask around among the hand applique types at guild to see if there’s a better way to manage a situation where your background is HUGE.  But I finished the third corner the other night while watching “The Cutting Edge” in lieu of the actual Olympic coverage.  (Don’t judge me.  I love that movie, cheesy ’80s soundtrack and all.  “Toe pick!”)

RW corner

This weekend I am attending my Embroiderers’ Guild annual retreat, where I started the hand applique for this quilt last year.  Perhaps in the interests of symmetry I’ll bring it along to finish; perhaps in the interests of not lugging that beast around with me, I won’t.   We’ll see.

I have also sent out “Kyoto Ink” and “Blue Butterfly Day” to Quilt Fest of New Jersey.  Having had the experience of mailing out “Watching the Wheels” to Quilt Odyssey last summer, I was a little more prepared for the mailing checklist, but I still wound up sewing the additional name/ address/ phone number label onto “Blue Butterfly Day” while sitting in a booth at the Maple Donuts next to the UPS store.  I took the quilts to the office (where there are no cats) and went through nearly a full roll of Scotch lint roller adhesive things removing cat hair before bagging the quilts up to send; this experience had me Googling “sphynx cat rescues.”

I always panic when I have to mail a quilt, but I know it’s an unavoidable aspect of showing quilts, unless I want to become some sort of manic quilt chauffeur.  UPS lets me virtually stalk the quilts’ progress through the online tracking, but there’s always the possibility that something devastating could happen.  I have to remind myself that, first of all, the quilts are just things.  They are things that I made with my hands and I’m therefore inordinately proud of them, but they are just things.  If they were lost, stolen, or destroyed, I would be sad, but I would persevere.  It is worth the risk in order to be able to display them in shows.  I have enjoyed attending quilt shows for years, and have certainly benefitted from the willingness of quilters from all over the world to let me view their work.  It’s my turn to take part and enjoy both the compliments and the criticism, and if that means I have to spend a few days with my heart in my throat while the quilts are in transit and out of my control, so be it.

Today is my first day since Feb. 5 driving my car!  We got it out yesterday afternoon (then got it stuck again yesterday evening) but I am now once again a member of the driving population and mistress of my own comings and goings.  At least the last time I was stranded carless due to snow, I was living in a major city with subways; this was a whole different animal (probably a yeti.)  So I can definitely, and gratefully, attend my quilt guild meeting tonight without having to impose on anyone.  Hooray.

WIPs, Part III: Window on Whimsy

The weather forecast was right.  Really, really right:

My street, 9:15 this morning!

I’ll be curious what the final snowfall in inches will be, but suffice to say I’m not going anywhere for a while.  The perfect time to get some quilting done!  Based on the snowball method I discussed in last night’s post, I’ve decided to work on “Window on Whimsy.”

I’ve said in previous posts that I love challenge quilts because they’re for me, but I get them finished since they have a deadline.  Well, that’s not always necessarily true.  My guild challenge for October 2009 was called “Slash Your Stash”:  make a quilt entirely out of fabric from your stash (including back and binding; we were allowed to buy batting) using one of two Log Cabin variation blocks.

I started this quilt during a quilting weekend at my house with Rhonda and Diane back at the beginning of August, which I thought gave me plenty of time.  Diane had given me a collection of half-yards of Jo Morton fabrics in blues and browns for my birthday three or four years ago, and I’d been collecting other fabrics to go with them without a clear idea of what I wanted to use them for, so I thought they would be perfect for this challenge.  I also had 1 1/4 yards of a panel print by Laurie Godin for Northcott called “Nature’s Whimsey” (her spelling, not mine.)

"Nature's Whimsey' by Laurie Godin for Northcott

I had seen it in the merchant mall at Quilter’s Heritage Celebration some years ago, but it was only available in kits, so I didn’t buy any, thinking I’d see it in the quilt shops.  By the time I’d realized I wasn’t going to find it anywhere, I couldn’t even find it online.  I’d given up on it (and had even paid way too much to buy the not-nearly-as-attractive alternate colorway in yellow and charcoal off a website) when I found a bolt of it at The Quilt Place in Rockledge, FL while visiting my sister in May 2008.  Since I was already buying a bunch of black and white prints for “Blue Butterfly Day” and I needed to fit it all in my suitcase, I only bought enough to have a 42″ square.  I knew I wanted to save it for something special, but I didn’t know what.  When the challenge was announced, I thought that perhaps I could find a way to frame the panel print with the required blocks.  I chose to use Ducks in a Row, and when I made a set of trial blocks (drafted down from the given 9″ block to a 6″ block, because I like to make more work for myself) I really liked how the three diagonal cream squares created a chain effect when the blocks were set on point.

Ducks in a Row on point

But then how to set the panel into the blocks?  I also had a nascent vision of creating the illusion of a window looking out onto the stylized floral landscape of the panel.

Then I Had An Idea.  And it was a capital-I Idea, not just one of those everyday run-of-the-mill ideas.  But this required research, experimentation, and a trip to the fabric store.  (Most Ideas do.)  My Idea was to cut the panel into 6″ on-point squares, and then piece it back together with 1″ lattice strips between the squares.  This would create the window effect, and because the strips would be the same size as the seam allowances, the panel would end up the same size as it had started.  It would also allow me to piece the panel into the blocks with no inset seams.  Since cutting the panel into on-point squares would mean that all the cut edges would be true bias, I would need to back the fabric with non-woven interfacing before I cut anything.  I just wanted to make sure this would work before I cut into the precious fabric I only had 1 1/4 yards of.  So I bought a cheap Noah’s Ark panel at JoAnn Fabrics, which could be turned into a charity baby quilt if it worked, and could be scrapped without (much) guilt if it didn’t.

And… it did!  Making slight adjustments to the technique, and using a thinner interfacing, I took a deep breath, cut up my precious fabric, and pieced it back together with the lattice strips.

I had to slash more than my stash for this challenge.

I made the rest of the blocks for the top, using 12 blue, 12 brown, and who-knows-how-many cream fabrics.  I usually get really anal about trying to achieve maximum entropy with a scrap quilt by not having the same fabric combination occur more than once, but my fabric piles must have gotten mixed up (or I did) and by the time I realized I had some duplicate blocks, I wasn’t going to go back and fix them.

I pieced it together, and it was BIG.  But as if that wasn’t enough, I decided it really needed a border to contain and complete the design.  As always, I found one that would work perfectly in “Pieced Borders:  The Complete Resource” by Judy Martin and Marsha McCloskey.  The book is out-of-print, but worth tracking down.  I got the border pieced and attached, but the October guild meeting was rapidly approaching.  It didn’t help that I was also finishing “Kyoto Ink” at the same time, for a deadline just 1.5 weeks later.  I managed to get the back pieced, the quilt basted, and some rudimentary quilting done so that the quilt could leave the house for the challenge meeting, but it certainly wasn’t done.  I then had to immediately put it aside in order to finish “Kyoto Ink” and attend Quilting with Machines.

No binding, almost no quilting, but it's at the meeting!

I did pick it back up at the beginning of December for my guild retreat; I spent two solid days machine quilting it.  But it’s a big quilt.  I still need to quilt the setting triangles, the border, and the panel areas, and I’m being extremely wishy-washy about what I want to do there.  The rest of the quilt is fairly densely quilted, so I can’t leave them empty, but I also don’t want to distract from the print design.  I’ll have to mull that over while I quilt the other areas.  I’m actually excited to bind this quilt (for the first time in my life) because I made a scrappy binding with the leftover strips from piecing the blocks, and I think it will be really cute.

A good Samaritan with a snowblower just cleared my sidewalk, so I don’t have to risk giving myself tendonitis in my wrist or throwing my back out shoveling, and can concentrate on finishing this quilt!

WIPs Part II: Taupe Winding Ways

Since I mentioned it while discussing Ruby Wedding, I should probably introduce Taupe Winding Ways, probably the oldest project I can legitimately call a WIP:

I would eat these fabrics with a spoon if I could.

I started this quilt at my guild retreat in April 2005.  I had started collecting the Daiwabo taupe fabrics from Japan after reading the article “Taupe:  Brown’s Elegant Cousin” by Jan Magee with Yoko Saito in the April 2004 issue of Quilters Newsletter Magazine.  I picked up more than a few at the Pinwheels booth at Quilt Odyssey, then built my collection on the Eastern Pennsylvania Shop Hop.  In fall 2004 – spring 2005, it was not a common color for American commercial fabrics, and I hadn’t yet developed my eye for differentiating the cooler shades of taupe from the warmer country-primitive yellow-browns; I frequently had to carry swatches of “true” taupes for comparison.  But that made it a fun treasure hunt, and although I hadn’t yet decided what I wanted to do with these fabrics, I knew I wanted it to be something special.

In the meantime, while in Indianapolis on vacation in August 2004, I had visited Kaye England‘s shop Quilt Quarters just south of the city.  (That branch has sadly closed since Kaye retired from shop ownership, but its sister shop in Carmel, IN is going strong under new ownership and is well worth visiting.)   There I purchased, after seeing a gorgeous shop model and hearing rave reviews of the technique, the book “Winding Ways Quilts:  A Practically Pinless Approach” by Nancy Elliott MacDonald.

My life has demonstrated in many ways more dramatic than this the truth of the saying, “Never say never.”  I’ve said I’d never do hand applique or hand quilting and lived to rue the day, so it’s no surprise that I used to say I’d never do curved piecing.  I don’t know why I was afraid of it, other than the fact that many more experienced quilters than I had said it was difficult.

But every apparel sewer who has set in a sleeve or done a princess seam has achieved curved piecing, and I’ve certainly done both many times over.  Besides — difficult?  I thrive on difficulty!  As my husband is wont to say, I’m a difficultist!  And Nancy Elliott MacDonald’s book is truly excellent, with pictures that illustrate every single step.  (I have had it with books and magazines that purport to show a technique step-by-step, but seem to have a “black box” step somewhere in the middle.  “Here are completely superfluous pictures of steps 1 and 2, which are patently obvious, then a miracle occurs off-camera, and here we are at step 4.”  Grrr.)

So, after deciding to make a taupe winding ways quilt, I spent the entire first day of the guild retreat lovingly sorting, pressing, and cutting my precious taupe fabrics.  I took a good deal of kidding from the other attendees, because as I went through the fabrics I kept exclaiming, “Oh, this one’s my favorite!” … two fabrics later… “Oh, this one’s my favorite!”  It pretty much took all weekend to make a three block by three block square so I could see a complete circle in the secondary pattern, but I was thrilled with the result.  So thrilled, in fact, that I decided to make a queen-sized quilt.  Out of six inch blocks.

That’s 255 blocks, with 64 half-blocks for the border.  Oy.

However, it really has been a WIP lo these nearly five years.  Any time I just want to spend some pleasant hours at the sewing machine, I sit down and make winding ways blocks, usually in sets of 12: six light-on-dark, six dark-on-light.  I did all the cutting several years ago, so I just have to pair sets of “middles” with sets of “borders” and sew away.  I’ve kept a running tally on the whiteboard in the studio as to how many blocks are complete.

I can make a quick trick block stack.

About three years ago, I decided to sew together a quarter of the top so that I’d have a more tangible sign of progress than just the growing stacks of blocks; that’s the picture at the top of this post and in the blog header.  I took it with me to a quilting design class at Quilting with Machines in Aurora, OH in October 2009 to get classmates’ suggestions as to how to quilt it, so I’m excited about that step.  I thought I’d get motivated to finish the whole thing in time for our guild show in June 2010, but that was when I still believed I’d have Ruby Wedding finished last July; I sincerely doubt they would both be finished in time.

The big news, though, is that as of two weeks ago, I have all 255 blocks completed!  I still have to make the half-blocks for the border… and assemble it… and make a back… and baste… and quilt… and bind…  But hey!  The journey of a thousand miles and all that!  It’s taken me almost five years to make 255 blocks; the rest isn’t going to be finished in five minutes.

And this is going to be one that’s worth the wait.

And Introducing the WIPs! Part I: Ruby Wedding

A handful of years ago, as I realized that my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary was fast approaching (July 2009) I started thinking about making them a quilt to commemorate the occasion.  Of course, the first design I thought of was Double Wedding Ring.  It’s topical, it’s traditional, it’s impressive as hell.  No, I then thought, that’s crazy.  That’s way too ambitious.  It’ll never get finished.  Do something basic and pretty, with stars or something.  At least then you’ll get it finished and they’ll get to go home with a quilt on their actual 40th wedding anniversary.

I believe you can see where this is going:

Biting off, successful! Chewing, still in progress.

My downfall began with my discovery of John Flynn’s method for Double Wedding Ring.  Analytical, nerdy, math-heavy approaches to quilting almost always appeal to me, so John Flynn is naturally one of my favorite quilters; I really have to muster up to take a class from him one of these days.  I had also taken the plunge into curved piecing with my eternal WIP, Taupe Winding Ways (pictured in the blog header), so I thought this could potentially work.

Then my friend Kathy gave me an issue of Quilts Japan featuring Double Wedding Ring, and I saw a beautiful appliqued quilt that is the major design concept source for this one:

From Quilts Japan May 2007; quilter's name untranslatable (by me)

I decided I wanted to use red for the rings, since the 40th anniversary is traditionally styled the Ruby anniversary.  However, while red is my dad’s favorite color, my mom likes blue, and I didn’t want to end up with the Yankee Doodle quilt as their gift.  Then, at Seminole Sampler in Catonsville, MD, I found the fabric that inspired the color story for the entire quilt.

It really tied the whole quilt together, Dude.

I think this is quite possibly the only time in my life I have ever purchased nine yards of fabric at full price and done so with a song in my heart.  If I hadn’t gotten it for the back, to my way of thinking, the whole quilt would have been spoiled.  All the other decisions regarding fabric and color placement and applique design just fell into place after that.

I’ll have you know, I started this quilt more than a year in advance of the anniversary.  I shopped for fabric on a trip to Massachusetts in February 2008, then made a four-ring wall hanging as a birthday present for my friend Rhonda in May 2008 to make sure I really could execute the design.  I spent the entire weekend of MAQ in July 2008 sewing and subcutting and resewing my strip sets.  I had as much of the piecing accomplished as I could and still keep the applique sections portable by November 2008.  At that rate, I would have been finished.

Rhonda's Birthday Quilt, 2008: 42" x 42"

But then I made a whole bunch of Hunter’s Star tablerunners as Christmas presents.  And then I assembled, quilted, and bound a queen-size Log Cabin quilt as a charity fundraiser.  And then — I started appliqueing.  I appliqued the daylights out of that thing:

1)  the entire weekend of my EGA chapter retreat in February 2009;

2)  the entire week of my recuperation from laparascopic abdominal surgery at the beginning of April 2009;

3)  the entire weekend of my quilt guild retreat at the end of April 2009

4)  while at the Ricky Tims Super Seminar in May 2009

and on and on, at home and at the office, in waiting rooms and during guild meetings, everywhere and anywhere I could get away with it.  But there was an awful lot of applique to be done.  The longer it dragged on, the more little deals I made with myself:  OK, maybe it won’t get finished, but it’ll be quilted.  OK, it won’t be quilted, but the top will be finished.  Suffice to say, on my parents’ anniversary, July 19, 2009, they were presented with a top with three of its four borders sewn in place and some bedraggled Celtic bias tubes hanging off the bottom.  They were surprised and happy; I was more than a little ashamed of myself.

Artfully photographed to hide the missing border.

I really enjoyed appliqueing the Celtic knotwork.  I have learned a lot from this piece, not least of which is that what I hate about hand applique isn’t that it’s handwork; I’m just not particularly fond of needleturn at this time in my life.  The bias tubes eliminated the raw edges, making the process not only pleasant but actually fun.  I will definitely include hand-appliqued bias tubing in future projects — just perhaps not quite so much mileage.

I finished sewing the bottom border on this past Monday, more than six months after I asked for it back to finish it.  And I still have some applique to do to resolve the side Celtic braids into the corner squares.  Obviously, I already have the backing fabric, and I think I know how I want to quilt it, but wow am I dreading the binding!  Kyoto Ink took me literal days to bind, and it’s lap size.  But this quilt has to keep that beautiful scalloped edge.  And frankly, considering how long it’s taken me to get it to this point, I should be grateful to bind it.  Perhaps it will be ready for my parents’ 41st anniversary.

This is one of the many reasons that I’m glad my mom is also a quilter.  She understands.  I just don’t want to let that understanding act as an excuse to let Ruby Wedding lapse into UFO-dom.