A Start and a Finish

Good morning, my friends. It was another mostly sewing day. We'll make up for all that sewing time today. It's a grocery shopping day, and we have a couple of other errands to run as well. Nevertheless, having a few days to focus on sewing has felt like a little mini vacation.

The morning started with the first stitches on Pieces of the Heart. This is going to stitch up pretty fast, I think.

After that, I checked on the garden. Several more zucchini were harvested. The zucchini is piling up again. I have several meals planned for the week that will use some of it, but not enough. Back inside, there was one short housekeeping chore on the agenda, but then I was able to pick up again with the quilting.

Starting with the nine-patch block, I gave it some terry twists. As long as I’m doing feathers in the block backgrounds, that seemed as good a choice as any for those two sections on the right.

From there, I moved to the right and quilted the bathtub block. For this, I outlined most of the embroidery, and then filled in with a meandering feather in the backround.

There was an embroidered border at the bottom, and I did some loop de loop stuff there. There’s another border like this at the top of the quilt. I’ll do the same thing there.

As a reminder, this is that the whole quilt looks like. 

Today I’ll start quilting the large camper block at the top half of the quilt. It’ll be done pretty much the way the other blocks have been done. Also, I’ll quilt that embroidered border at the top. From there, I’ll have the pieced blocks and the blue borders to quilt. Probably, I’ll do this one side per day, and I’ll also quilt the adjacent blue border. If I can keep up that pace, I should have this ready for binding within the week.

So, I’ve left it needle-down at the braided rug there, and I’ll start on this after lunch today.

And I’m happy to say that the Lemurs are finished. It took a while, but I finished off all the thread-painting.

Then I added the quilt back and did some light quilting in the background. Behind the lemurs, I quilted a fern on either side. 

At the left side and the bottom, I quilted a leafy vine.

Then, I machine sewed the binding. 

From there, I thought I’d stop for the day, but I hand-sewed the binding while we watched the news, and the Lemurs are finished.

For comparison, here is the original photograph:

Here’s how they look from the back. It ends up at 24 x 17 inches.

And that was a good way to end the day. 

With the Lemurs finished, I’ll be moving to the next section on my white board which is to sew together a large quilt top. The only thing listed there are the blocks for A Year in the Garden.

Since I only just finished December’s block, I’m not sure I’m ready to start on that just yet. Instead, I’ll probably choose one of the smaller quilts to finish off. I believe the next one on the list is the “Cozy Quilt” project. 

It was one of the “short” embroidery projects I finished up a couple of months ago. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but I have some pretty fabrics to choose from. 

All right then. We have many miles to travel between now and whatever time I’ll have for sewing this afternoon. It’s probably time to be on my way.