Ready for Binding

Good morning, my friends. It's chilly, but sunny here this morning. We're expecting this weather to continue through the rest of the week. It seems like a good time to be finishing off my winter quilts. Last month it was I Believe in Snowmen. This month, we're finishing up the Snowflakes quilt. It's good to be moving things along. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we had an appointment for our COVID boosters, and so I wasn't sure how much time I'd have for sewing. Fortunately, I'm an early riser, and so I had time to finish off the quilting before we left. Just the outer border remained.

For this border, I wanted to do something "swoopy" that would suggest snowdrifts. It was tempting to just follow the lines on the fabric, but it's a directional fabric. It faces the same direction all the way around the quilt, and so using those lines would have meant long swooping lines at the top and bottom, and shorter ones on the sides. I decided to look for something else, and came up with a swoopy circle motif on Pinterest. It's a little hard to see on the front:

Here's how it looks from the back. It was an easy motif to stitch, and I went around my quilt at about 100 mph.

In less than an hour, the quilting was finished.

Here's a closer look from the back:

Backing up for a bigger view, here's how it looks:

It was time to get ready to go by that time. We were at a grocery store pharmacy. Did you know Safeway stores give you a 10% discount off your groceries for getting your vaccines there? So, while we waited the required 15 minutes, we went out into the store and purchased all the things on our list. Time was up by then, and so we headed for home.

There, I found Smitty wondering when we're going to sew on the binding. He's gearing up for the lap-sitting-while-hand-stitching part of his job. He even took time out from killing his feather toy to remind me we weren't finished with this quilt.

So I still had fabrics spread out on my work surface in preparation for sewing the Heartland Barns into a finished quilt top. You might remember these from yesterday's post.

Right away, I removed a few of them that seemed completely wrong. From there, my goal was to simply sash the embroidered blocks, and then figure out what to do next. I checked the browns against the color of the brown floss in the embroidery, and selected the darkest brown at the bottom middle of the image above. When they were all sashed and bordered, it looked like this:

While I was checking the widths of those strips, I uncovered another pattern I'd printed off at some point. I found this one on allpeoplequilt.com. It's a Maple Leaf Log Cabin quilt pattern. The blocks for this quilt finish up at nine inches.

I like the look of those, and they would allow me to use several of the fabrics I've pulled for this quilt. I'm thinking of making the leaves scrappy, and then using consistent browns (and maybe some greens) for the "logs." The sewn together embroidered blocks end up at 35-1/2 inches by 40 inches. Those numbers don't exactly work for the nine-inch blocks, but I'm confident I can find a way to sew it all together. It'll require some thought, and some diagrams, and some math. As I've said many times, I'm much too old for math. With enough motivation, I can get the old brain cells firing again. 

So the vaccine made me feel a little feverish. I was up early this morning and took some Tylenol, which helped. Before I do anything more with the Heartland Barns, I want to get the Snowflakes squared up and the binding sewn on. After that, I'll figure out what to do about the barns and maple leaves. I think I'm on the right track now.