Burning Leaves

Good morning, my friends! It's going to be a good day. I know this because I'm going to finish off the Heartland Barns quilt top today. It has been on my mind for weeks. While I was shut out of the sewing room, I knew it was the next quilt top I was going to finish, and I was itching to get at it. When I could finally get back to sewing, it became my burning obsession. Maybe I'm trying to make up for lost time. 

Even an obsession takes a back seat to a slow morning though, and I didn't get into the sewing room until after lunch yesterday. I was determined to finish the final eight leaves. They might have gone a little bit faster than the day before, if for no other reason than I had no kitty helpers. I took a break when I had them this far along.

When I returned, I sewed on the "logs."

And then I laid them around the center panel. I decided to go with my original idea of turning the corner leaves inward, and then alternating the ones in between. After taking the picture below, I rotated the ones on the left side so they were all pointing up.

And here's where the rubber meets the road because I couldn't put off doing some quilter's math from this point. If you smelled smoke around the 3:00 hour (PST), it was probably me putting some brain cells to work. It was actually pretty easy to figure out. When I added the inner borders of the correct width, the leaves fit just right. In the image below, the top and bottom row of leaves are sewn to the center section.

All that's left now is to sew together the side rows of leaves and then sew them to the quilt. I thought I might put one more narrow border around the outer edge, but I've decided against it. A dark brown binding will finish it off nicely. It will end up at 64 x 64 inches.

Okay, so that's my only goal for the day...that, and mopping the kitchen floor. I'm not a fanatic about a clean house, but having stuff stacked around for months made it difficult to clean anything very well. If one can say housework is a good thing, then I'll just say it's better when it can be done unencumbered by obstacles. 

When those two things are finished, I'll probably make the gingerbread biscotti I've been promising Mike. After that, I'll be deciding what to work on next. Unless I change my mind, I'm going to quilt and finish off this small Snowflake quilt I made on last year's winter trip.

If you were hanging around when I made this last year, then you might remember the piecing error. In my defense, it was in the pattern too. I just didn't notice it until it was all sewn together. I could take that piece out, but I decided to work with it and embroider a sparkly blue snowflake in that spot.

But I'm not happy with that snowflake, and so I'm going to take it out and try again. I like the idea, but I want the snowflake to be stitched better, and I want it to fill more of the square. I'm all out of that blue sparkle floss, but I have some other metallic flosses I can use. The biggest challenge with metallic floss is threading the needle. (Note to self: Use a length of floss long enough to finish it off.)

Okay, so there's plenty on the agenda, as usual. I'm so happy being back in the sewing room and moving my projects along. Oh, how I missed them when they moved into the garage. It's almost as much fun as having the family return home for a feast.