What I did last night

I've said before that I do most of my quilting at night, so that explains the crusty-bad-lighting pictures. I apologize!

Last night I was working on several things, and actually made pretty good progress on two projects, and finished a third! Woot woot!

First, I finished quilting the top of the blue quilt. I'm going to wait to show it to you until it's finished, because the quilting of this one is going to tell a lot of the "story" of the quilt. But here is a teaser of some of the scraps. ;-)

I also started quilting my Grandfather's quilt - the red and gray one. It is VERY different machine quilting a "real" sized quilt than it is working on a small sandwich or something. It's going to take some figuring, especially with my current setup. I'll save that for another post. It's a good start though.

After my shoulders had had too much of sitting at the machine, I hand stitched the binding on the yellow sampler. Which didn't get finished over Thanksgiving (big surprise...) so that one is officially done!

Yay for productivity!

Bias Binding

After quilting my wedding ring sample, I decided to go ahead and bind it so it wouldn't be considered a UFO anymore. I've never done bias binding before, and I'd never bound a curvy quilt before either, but I know they go hand in hand.

I cut off the extra backing and batting off from around the blocks (carefully!) with a small rotary cutter, and then I just took some of the left over background fabric and cut it at a 45 degree angle. It's definitely a lot different to press and sew this binding, but I just went for it. It came out ok, but I definitely need more practice for those inside corners.

I still need to hand stitch the back of the binding, but I figure I can do that over the holiday, when I'm spending time with family instead of in the sewing room!

Crawling on the floor

I spent this evening getting the gray quilt ready for quilting! I pieced the back - where I ended up not using the HSTs. I was having so much fun rearranging them that I decided to save them for another project. Luckily, I had enough of the backing fabric that I was able to use it without piecing anything else in.

I basted the quilt by taping to the floor by layers from the backing up to the top, then pinning at 6-ish inch intervals.

Charlotte helped. She's cute.

Pinning like it's my job.

Yay painter's tape!

All done, and ready for quilting!!