Two Days, Two Quilts

When I finished up the quilting for the Bumblebee Playground table runner, I went straight to work on the Block Party quilt. This is the quilt for my guild challenge, which involves using a range of neutrals (in my case, white to black), one color, and one "zinger". After giving it some thought, I decided to quilt it with a sort of blocky meander:

Things were moving along pretty well until...

Uh-oh. There seems to be an impawdiment to my purrogress.

Hi, Mom. This is a nice comfy bathmat you've given me here. 

Thank you. It's a purrfect time to attend to my purrsonal hygiene.

My furs were feeling a little, oh I don't know...mussed up. Just a little smoothing here...

There. That's much better. [Yawn] I'm awfully tired. This might be a purrfect time for a nap.

Don't mind me. I'll just lie right here, and keep you company.

What?

We had a little conversation and I encouraged him to consider the chair as his best option for a nap. Then, I was able to get on with my quilting.

When the quilting was finished, it looked like this:

Here's how it looks from the back:

I was having a little trouble with thread breakage as I worked on this, and I was also getting some tension headaches too. I ended up taking out a little bit of the quilting early on when tension issues were too obvious to ignore. Then I quilted the remainder of the quilt. When I took it downstairs to add the binding, I could still see needle holes where I'd taken out those stitches. This surprised me. These are not batiks. They're regular quilter's cottons and Kona solids, so they don't even have a particularly tight weave.

I gave it a good spritz of water and kind of worked it out with my fingers. Then I ironed over it, and it was good as new.

Then I gave it a little yellow flange and a nice striped binding.

And this puppy is ready for hand stitching.

Now I'm taking a little break from it. I have some things to do outside. The bird feeders are empty, which seems to be their usual state now that all of the birds, their friends, their families, and their college roomates have arrived. It's hard to keep up with them at this time of year. Also, I need to check the water levels on the annuals and make sure they're not thirsty.

Yesterday evening, I noticed that two of the purple iris had bloomed. This variegated one:

And this pretty purple.

Also today I'm making up a batch of chicken pot pies. It's a bit of a to-do for those, but the recipe makes eight individual pies. We'll have two for dinner tonight, and then we'll have two when we go over to the beach for the weekend at the end of the month. 

We're heading up to Whistler, B.C., in June where we'll meet up with some old friends from high school. They have a time share in Whistler, and they invited us to join them. I've volunteered to make the breakfasts and the dinners, which is easy for me. I have whole databases of meals suitable for camping, and they're easy to make ahead for a trip like the one we're planning. So, all of that to say that the remaining four pot pies will go with us when we go to Canada. I have a lasagna already made up to take along, and the remaining meals will be things for the crockpot or the grill that we can easily make while we're up there.

So that's it from me today. I'm hoping to at least get a start on the hand-stitching for Block Party. For sure, I'll have it finished by tomorrow.