It was a good quilting day yesterday. Of course, I didn't get to the quilting right away. First, I finished stitching the first Santa from the Santa Quartet. With him finished, I moved my hoop to the right.
When I finished with the stitching, I took a little walk around outside. The bird feeders needed filling, and I needed to check the watering. And wow...look at this lithodora. So pretty.
Here's our red azalea.
The fourth of five rhododendrons is starting to bloom. We have another dark purple one that is still in tight buds.
I noticed this blooming tree at the edge of our woods. My phone tells me it is a Hawthorne. This one is growing wild.
Here's a close-up of its flowers.
The rhodies at either end of the herb garden are nearly in full bloom. This pinky-peachy one is at one end of the herb garden.
This one is at the other end.
Not many chives came back this year. They change from year to year. I have enough chive blossom vinegar to get me through, and so it's okay if we don't get many this year. They're blooming just the same.
This is the Lavender Whisper peony. I'm so excited to see this one. It replaced a "failed clone" we planted when the rest of the peonies were planted. It would put out big buds that went straight to seed without ever producing a flower, and so this one took its place. This will be the first time I've actually seen it bloom, and it is sooooooo close.
This teaser is the "Joker" peony. It lives up to its name. It is covered in buds, and they are being impossibly slow to open.
I was excited to see plums on the plum tree. These won't be ready until near September, but I have a couple of desserts I love to make from them. I'm hoping we'll get a warm summer and they'll ripen before we take off on our fall trip. (And I'm hoping there's no gasoline shortage, or we might have to cancel our plans. That would be a shame because I'm looking forward to that trip. More about that later…and if we do it.)
These are some of the annuals I planted last month. They're doing pretty well. The squirrels want to dig around in the pots, but they've not done too much damage so far.
Back inside, I took a walk on the treadmill and then got to work on my quilting. This is the Block 9.
When it was finished, I laid it out for a picture. These are the six of nine blocks that I've quilted. I'm pretty happy with how this is going.
Here's a little peek at the back. This is the left side, and the block I just quilted.
Now, it's back on the machine. I've turned it upside down in order to keep the bulk of the quilt on the table, rather than in my lap. I like to work from left to right, and so I'll start with Block 3.
From there, I headed into the sewing room. Honestly, I wasn't sure I could force myself to sandwich another quilt...not even a small one. When I realized I could clamp it to my ironing board, I felt more motivated.
When it was ready for quilting, I set up the machine for free motion quilting and went to work. I ended up doing terry twists for the quilt blocks, and I used a heart-shaped cookie cutter to quilt some hearts in the background areas.
It took less than an hour, and it was finished. Smitty helped me squre it up.
Here, you can see the terry twists. A few of them twisted in the wrong direction. I decided it didn't matter.
In the lower corners, I did a little stylized heart.
At the upper "V," I did another heart with streamers heading off in either direction.
It's hard to see anything here, but this is how it looks from the back.
It ends up at 16-1/2 by 18-1/2 inches. It was late in the day by then, and so I cut the binding strips and left it for today. I'm hoping I'll have time to finish it off this afternoon.
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we're having brunch with Erik, Mae, and Mae's mother today. I'm looking forward to that. And to all of you who are mothers, have a mother, want to be a mother, are a mother-to-be, or if you're just missing your mother today (as I am), then Happy Mother's Day. It's shaping up to be a good day. I hope you have a good day too.
No comments:
Post a Comment