Beyond the Stars quilting

 I've been working on quilting the Beyond the Stars Sampler 15 this week, along with doing some fabric sorting and other cleaning. The room the quilt frame is in can be a dumping ground for the leftovers from projects since I store my fabric in that room, too. When I'm working on a project, I save most scraps because you never know if you'll need every bit you have until you're finished. I've been going through those scraps and organizing them into usuable, unusable and won't use. Some pieces are big enough for a pillowcase, so I have a pile of them to make now. 

Question of the day: Would Conrad use a hammock if I made him one? 

Two are finished. What did I think I was going to make out of that Duck Dynasty fabric anyway?

I'm updating this with a picture of the finished quilting. 

Desert Sky finish

My quilt guild, Piecemakers, hosted Connie Lange, a Judy Niemeyer trained teacher, last summer to speak at our guild meeting. She also did a class to help us learn the techniques and ease of paper piecing the Judy N. way.  It was very informative, and a fun, faster way to pp using strip piecing methods. We did some precutting before class so that we could get a head start on the day of class. The precutting was definitely worth it, as it takes some time in itself. By precutting, we were able to start in with the sewing right away. 

I got about two thirds of it done, then set it aside for awhile to work on other projects for classes. When I finished it a few months ago, I accidently turned some around and sewed them together partially in the wrong order. So up close isn't quite right, but at a distance it looks fine, I think. (If you are reading this Connie, don't look too closely!)

I recently quilted and bound it, so it's officially finished. I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle another Judy pattern any time soon, but it was fun making this one and learning the techniques.

Our guild hasn't met since February because of the virus, so I miss that stimulation of new projects shown and friendly chatter. We were to have several fun sounding classes, but they were cancelled. I hope that we are able to meet again soon!

 

Sunbonnet Sue Sampler 1

I designed this very basic sampler to using traditional blocks to teach quilters how to move on from Beginning Quilting and learn new techniques, including half square triangles and blocked sashing. 

As you can tell from the fabrics, this is about 15 years old, give or take a year or two. The students also made Sunbonnet Sue using fusible webbing and then handstitched around the pieces. 

This is probably the oldest one of my quilts that was not quilted until recently. After several years of using it,  I made a different, brighter version of this quilt as I had grown tired of the fabrics. Now where is that picture....

Finished!

Quilting some UFOs

Since I haven't been teaching classes, I have more free time lately. I wish I could say I'm using the time to the utmost. I'm not. But I have been working on getting some quilts from the UFO pile quilted. 

I don't have as many unfinished or in progress quilt projects as many people do because I have to finish them in order to use them for class models. I haven't always quilted them before using them. It is easier to hang quilts unquilted, plus I didn't always have the time to get it done. 

I started a series of samplers that I designed to help teach different aspects of quilting. These proved to be popular, so I continued. This was #5, Row by Row, which I made in about 2007. I always use a different setting and different blocks. Eventually I started designing new blocks as well, but for this one I used traditional blocks.

My quilting machine is an oldie and doesn't always want to cooperate, (or it might be me not being consistent in my movements....), but it's been working pretty well lately. Conrad has really taken a fancy to this quilt, taking every opportunity before and after the binding to sleep on it.  

It is hard to bind with him around sometimes!