Starting to Finish

Good morning, my friends. It ended up being quite a busy day here at the Three Cats Ranch. It was our day to mop the floor. Mike helps me move everything out of the way, and he does the sweeping. Then, it's up to me to do the mopping. For this task, I mopped myself to the door leading to the chamber of horrors downstairs. Then, I walked on the treadmill while the floor dried. All of that took most of the morning.

After lunch, I went to work making the promised Cranberry Ecstasy Bars. It's been a while since I made these, and I'd forgotten what a to-do they are...well worth it, I might add. This is one of my favorite holiday baking projects. It was nearing dinner time when they were finished. After baking, frosting, sprinkling, refrigerating, and glazing, they looked like this.

I only make half the recipe, and I do them in a 9 x 9-inch baking dish. Now they're cut into twelfths for our morning snack enjoyment. It's a process making them. You first bake the "cake." Then it cools completely in the pan. Then, they're frosted with a cream cheese frosting and sprinkled with minced dried cranberries. Then, it goes into the refrigerator for an hour. Then, they're drizzled with a while chocolate drizzle. Yum. And by then, you're pretty well dirtied every vessel in the kitchen. Thank goodness for dishwashers.

Of course, none of this could happen until I'd done my morning slow stitching. I took the first stitches on "Walk the dog." Mainly, I was using up the cut-off bits from the last time I worked on this project. When I'd finished for the morning, I move my hoop to the right to encompass the right side of the design. Probably, I'll be stitching on this for another couple of days.

It was after lunch before I could turn my attention to my other sewing projects. I ended up sticking with my original choice of fabric for the back of the Blue Blazes mini.

And I cut two strips for the binding. The quilt is 15-1/2 inches square, and so two strips will do the job.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'll need to take breaks from the quilting on Calendula Patterdrip's Cottage. I have in mind to sew the four "Seasons" blocks into a finished quilt top. These are the embroidered sections.

Really, I haven't the foggiest notion how I'm going to sew these into a single quilt. The embroidered sections were created to be individual quilts. Obviously there's no reason they can't be sewn into a single large quilt, but I haven't given a lot of thought about how to accomplish this. I'm still mulling it over. 

Nevertheless, I spent some time pulling fabrics that could be used. I won't use all of these, but getting them out gives me a place to start thinking. I have in mind to stack them one on top of the other, but offset them from right to left...sort of zig-zag style. Clear as mud, right? Well, I have a picture in my head about how this could work, but I can't describe it very well. 

In any case, these are the fabrics I've nominated to be included in the finished quilt top. Probably only one or two will make the cut.

I'm kind of partial to the sunflower batik in the middle, combined with the polka dot in the upper left. There is probably enough yardage in a few of these to make them candidates for a quilt back. 

Okay, but enough of this procrastination. I was dragging my feet a little getting to the start of free motion quilting on Calendula Patterdrip's Cottage. It's one of the larger quilts I've ever quilted by myself, and so it's a little daunting. And since my wrist has started bothering me every time the mention of free motion quilting comes up, it's even more daunting to consider a many-days-long project like this one. As a reminder, here's how the quilt looks.

I'll be using a Bottom Line white in the bobbin. Already I had a bobbin partially wound, and so this was an easy choice. 

For the top thread, I'll use this tan So Fine thread. It's a 50 weight thread, and so it should play well with the 60 weight Bottom Line thread in the bobbin. The So Fine thread was a gift from my quilting fairy godmother, Ila. Thank you, Ila.

As I was setting the machine up, I realized I'd used a Bottom Line thread for my last project, and so the tension was already pretty well adjusted. Testing it out...it looked pretty good. I did loosen the top thread just a tiny bit before starting.

And then there was this...I'd left myself a message from when it was sandwiched. I was telling myself the quilt back was a little short at the bottom left corner, and so I should start the quilting there. 

As a general rule, quilting should start in the middle of the quilt and work outward. The quilt will shrink as it's quilted. Think about it...and maybe this is obvious, but please allow me to finish with my brain fart. If you were to start at the outer edges and work your way inward, you could end up with too much fabric at the center. Thus, the recommendation to start in the middle. But here's the thing...this is much more important with hand quilting. It's less important with machine quilting, but I usually start in the middle anyway. With this note I'd left for myself, I had in mind to start at the lower left corner and work my way across the expanse of the quilt diagonally. I hope that makes sense.

Then, when I actually looked at this trouble spot, it didn't look so bad. I'd laid my tweezers there so you can see where the edge of the quilt back is. It's really not that bad, and I could probably start anywhere I wanted to.

Already, though, I'd made up my mind to start at that corner, and so I did. I'll work my way across the quilt bottom (all pieced blocks) from left to right, and then I'll work my way back from right to left. And I'll just keep working back and forth until I reach the quilt top and a finish.

So I'm doing dot-to-dot quilting, Angela Walters style. This is very simple to do, although it takes some practice to hit those marks accurately.

And then I just continued on block after block...

After block.

And this is working out well because there's a row of half square triangles above the row of pieced blocks, and so I can travel to the block to the right using the same dot-to-dot method.

I'm trying to be consistent, using the same design in identical blocks.

For this rail fence block, I got a little fancier with lines and ruler work.

And then I returned to the curved lines.

When I had it that far, I got a little stuck trying to decide how to travel from block to block when I ran out of the row of half square triangles. Reaching the broom, I spent some time considering how to quilt that block. I have some ideas, but I decided I'd quilted enough for one day. In deference to my bothersome left wrist, it seemed like a good place to stop. 

Here's how it's looking from the back. And this is why I love this dot-to-dot method so much. The patterns that emerge on the back look so pretty. For me, making the back look as good as the front is among the biggest challenges of machine quilting.

So I'll continue on with the quilting and I'll think some more about the Seasons quilt top today. Also, I'm going to make some turkey pot pies from the leftover turkey breast of last week. It's a bit of a to-do making the pot pies, but I'll get four meals from it by the time I'm finished. The filling is dished into 2-cup ramekins and then, for simplicity, I add a Pillsbury pie crust when we're ready to eat them. We'll have one each for dinner, and I'll keep two more for another dinner this week. The remaining four will go into the freezer for some future RV trip. 

It's another busy day ahead. There's no time like the present. Slow-stitching is next.