On the Border

Good morning, my friends. It was a mostly sunny day yesterday. Like us, the kitties were suffering from cabin fever after so many days of heavy rain. They were champing at the bit to get outside.

Inside, I finished off the 2nd block of Home is Where My Flock Is. These are fun to stitch.

Here are the two blocks I have for this quilt so far.

After that, I took a walk on the treadmill, and then got to work on my quilting. The straight-line diagonal grid is finished now. All that remains is to quilt the two borders.

Here's a closer look.

And here's how it looks from the back.

Usually, when I do a grid like this, the blocks are side by side. These blocks are sashed, and so the end of my lines of stitching dead-ended without going anywhere. (You can barely see them in the image below.) That looks strange on the back. It's personal preference, but if it doesn't go off the edge of the quilt, I want it to meet up somewhere else. Instead, my lines all ended like this.

So I stitched a line just inside the seam for the first border, and that finished it off.

That completed my hour's allotment of quilting. Today I'll get to work on the borders. Possibly I can finish both, but I'll aim for finishing the inner black border.

From there, it was time to piece together a back for Grandpa's Bridges. I'd been awaiting more of the border fabric, and that arrived in yesterday's mail. It gave me an extra two yards to work with. I ended up pulling the middle fabric below. It's been in my stash a long time. I purchased it way back in 2018 at a quilt shop located next door to the Texas Quilt Museum, in La Grange, Texas.

I had something in mind when I bought it, but I no longer recall what I was thinking. It's been a hard fabric to use in any of my projects. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time using large-scale prints. This is one of those. Once it's cut into little pieces, the design is lost. The shapes and colors are mostly right for Grandpa's Bridges, and so sure. This is a good opportunity to put a stash freeloader to work.

Sadie appurroved. She likes how this looks with her furs.

Finally, I cut binding strips from the fabric below. Now the whole project will go into the quilts to be quilted pile. 

There wasn't a lot of time left in the day, but I sandwiched Autumn's Harvest Pumpkin for quilting. I'll be quilting this one on my domestic machine. There should be time for that today.

It's a grocery shopping day, and then I'll get back to my sewing. There's nothing else on the day's agenda, and so I'm hoping to get Autumn's Harvest Pumpkin to binding stage. If I can get It Takes a Village to binding stage as well, I can call it a good day. And as long as nobody dies, it'll be a good day either way. 

Reveal day for the sashiko project is approaching. I need to be thinking about writing my post for that. Any guesses on what this might be?

You won't have to wait much longer to find out. The reveal is this Friday.