New Project Enthusiasm

Or how I've spent my last two days.

I love starting new projects. Thankfully I also like finishing projects, LOL. Once I figured out what I wanted to do for the "posies and celtic" quilt, I really wanted to get it started. In my last post, I mentioned cutting all my freezer paper pieces. Yesterday I laid out all the fabrics and adhered the freezer paper to the fabrics I wanted. Each block will be a different combination of colors (I hope, I just picked and stacked and figured with the colors I had that repeating the same combination twice was unlikely...time will tell on that!) and I'm ready to start basting the edges on those. I enjoy these extra steps and I like the end result the extra prepwork gives me so it's all good. Here is the stack of posie pieces and leaves. The leaves are trimmed and ready to baste, the posies haven't been done, yet. The squares for the yo-yos are also cut.

The bigger part of the job was making the celtic bias for applique. I LOVE doing this. Step one is cutting one inch strips on the bias. They then get sewn together end to end. The whole thing is pressed in half, then sewn 1/4 inch from the folded edge. That's where it is in this picture. I then have to go back and trim next to the seam to make pressing easier.

Once the seam allowance is trimmed, a bias bar is slid through, one bar length at a time and the seam allowance is rolled to the middle of the bar and pressed. I then wind it onto a card to keep it tangle free and to keep the folds pressed. The first few yards of this will be used as the vine for the applique blocks, the rest will be appliqued down in a braided design in the sashing and some other undetermined design in the outer border.

Yesterday I made a trip to JoAnn's for a much needed bolt of bleached muslin. I'm still hoping to baste a quilt this week, I just haven't yet decided which one I want to quilt next. I prefer muslin for my backs, truth be told in part because it reduces cost. I also really like the "whole cloth" look on the back of my quilts when I use muslin. I also like it for the backgrounds of some of my quilts, especially when I plan to have a lot of quilting on them.

Tomorrow I'll be cutting background for the new quilt and possibly starting the first block, once I decide for sure what I want to use as the background.

And no post is complete without a current Ruthie picture. This one is from our family reunion. She really surprised me during the reunion week, with 3 big parties and a week full of new faces and activites she did quite well. Here she is enjoying some chips and dip at one of the parties. I'm not sure which one of her siblings (or their boyfriends) are causing the twinkle in her eye in this picture, but I love this one.

So that's it for now, time for more Olympics and a bit of hand sewing after a long day of cutting and pressing.

Happy Quilting!

Sue