A Finish in my Future

Good morning, my friends. Except for a short time in my purgatory of housekeeping chores, it was all sewing all the time yesterday. My day started with stitching enough of the "Joyful Journey" piece to decide to move my hoop.

Now I've hooped the last of it. This won't be finished today, but I'll have it finished in a day or two. It's probably time to make up a new one. You wouldn't want me to get the stitching DT's would you?

From there, I went to work on my quilting. My goal was to quilt the setting triangles, and then see whether I wanted to continue. So, I continued on with the dot-to-dot quilting in the triangles. For the side triangles, I did a series of five "blades" extending out from the center of the longest side.

In the corners, I did four points, extending out from the middle to the edge.

There were eight side triangles and, of course, four corner triangles. Those took a good part of the day. I like this dot-to-dot quilting, and it was a good choice for this quilt. Nevertheless, it's a little cumbersome using the ruler and keeping my lines nice and straight. 

This quilt has also been a good one for practicing hitting my mark. A long time ago, I gave up on "perfection" as a goal for my quilts. Now my goal is to learn something from each quilt. Hitting my marks is what the Blackwork Baskets will teach me. When I was attempting a similar design on the quilt-along panel back in January, you can see that I was having a hard time hitting the exact spot on the return trip. You can see what I'm talking about at the top of the image below.

And so with this Blackwork Baskets quilt, I've had the same problem in a few places. With practice, I've seen improvement.

With all the triangles quilted, I was motivated to work on the black border. For this, I used a free motion motif Lori Kennedy refers to as "Greek Key." My own name for it is a squared-off "paperclip."

I don't know about you, but I have a hard time turning the corner with any free motion design. For years, I've tried unsuccessfully to turn a border corner with some level of panache, but I always come up short. Recently, I realized I could simply do something different in the corner. So, for the corner above, I stitched a triangle using the dot-to-dot technique. In the image below, I did two diamonds in the larger outer border before taking off on my free motion design.

And then...just for grins...I continued on a short distance with a diagonal upsy-downsy-backsy-forthsy motif. (Technical quilting terms. Try to keep up.) I was getting tired of quilting by then, and so I only went a short distance before stopping for the day.

For today, I'll finish off this border, and then it will be ready for binding. Earlier, I looked for any binding strips. I can't remember cutting any, and I couldn't find any either. So, I'll need to cut some binding strips, and then I'll probably find some I've already cut. Either way, I'll get the binding sewn on this today. Probably by the end of the day tomorrow, I'll have a finished quilt.

For my next trick...and maybe today...I'll start sewing together the Barn Block sampler. It's the next large quilt on my list of quilt tops to finish. These are the blocks I have for this quilt.

I'll probably keep the design pretty simple, and I'll probably fussy cut some blocks from one of my quilt block panels...I have a few to choose from. I picked up these two when I visited Missouri Star Quilt Company on our most recent trip.

And I have this one that I picked up at One Quilt Place in Fredericksburg, Texas. We visited Fredericksburg when we made our USA perimeter tour back in 2018. I can still recall the store employee cutting this so carefully to preserve the edges of each one of the blocks.

You might recall that I fussy cut the blocks from the one above to finish off the Appalachian Memories quilt.

So I'll do something like that. It'll probably require some figuring, and I haven't really thought it through yet.

There's a full day of sewing ahead. For now, I'll get back to my slow-stitching. There's one housekeeping chore on today's agenda, and then nothing will stand between me and my sewing. It's good to be back in a regular routine.