Quilted in a Day

Good morning, my friends. I'll admit, I'm feeling pretty smug this morning, having finished all the quilting for Joy in the Ordinary. It's a small quilt, and it will be my fifth finish for January. Not a bad start. Of course, the day started with some slow stitching. I made a little more progress on Grandpa's Bridges.

From there, I decided to move my hoop to the right to capture more of the bridge. There's still plenty of stitching to do on this one.

With that finished, it was time to sandwich Joy in the Ordinary for quilting.

This could not have been accomplished without Smitty's help.

There's not much to say about the thread I selected. I used the same thread both on top and in the bobbin. It was the best match for the aqua border and sashing. Probably I purchased this as a part of a set from Connecting Threads, but whatever labeling was on it is no longer present. All I know about it is the color and that it's a cotton thread.

I had in mind to do some straight stitching in the blocks using this 4-pointed star design. 

Here's how it looks from the back.

Usually, I select a thread that will blend in more, and so seeing the quilting so out front and visible was a little shocking. Nevertheless, I was brave and continued on. Cover me. I'm going in. 

When I had a whole row stitched, it looked like this.

So far, so good. And then, I just continued on until all the blocks were finished.

Here's how it looks from the back.

Here's a little closer look.

And then, I decided to do my usual upsy-downsy heart motif in the border. I left the narrow sashings unquilted.

Here's how that looks from the back. And you can see how I turned the corner there.

When I took it off the machine to bury some thread tails, Sadie decided to give it a pre-finish snuggleability test. Happily, it passed with four paws up.

Just the outer borders were left, and I did another slightly different upsy-downsy, rightsy-leftsy heart motif. Something about Jenny's patterns screams hearts and flowers to me.

Looking at the back, here are the two borders.

And there it is...all finished. Ta-da!

Here's how it looks from the back.

Before I finished for the day, I squared it up for binding.

Binding strips are already cut. I just need to sew them together and then sew them on.

So that will be today's effort. Also, I received the backing fabric for the Shop Hop 3.0 quilt...this one:

And this fabric might be the perfect fabric for finishing it off. I'll piece together a backing for this today, but it probably won't come up for quilting until sometime in 2026...if the world doesn't implode before then. What are the chances?

So, I'm not sure how much time I'll have for sewing today. I have a late morning appointment for a routine mammogram. There's no history of breast cancer in my family that I'm aware of, and so I don't think my risk of breast cancer is very high. Nevertheless, the older I get, the more I dread these screening tests. My thoughts usually start with, "What if this is the time that...?" And there's no point in taking that any further. My mom would have told me not to borrow trouble, and that's good advice.

There's probably time to fit in a little slow-stitching before I go. That will help calm my angst over the screening. Chin up. Here I go boldly ahead with the day.