1.29.2017

Progress toward the spinning wheel

Today I dropped off the barter quilt at the long-armer's.  I've never had a quilt quilted before and can't wait to see how it looks.  It will be a few weeks before it's ready.  

Here's the top, finished:



I went round and round about maybe taking the top two rows apart to get those yellows further from each other, but landed on leaving it and deciding that the top will actually be the bottom, which should make it much less noticeable.  On the whole ride there, I considered turning around and taking it home to fix, then taking it back next weekend, but once I looked at it in the store, it didn't bug me at all.  Which is good, because I don't want the longarm lady to think I'm crazy neurotic.  

Lesson: I need to be more careful with yellow.   

Here's the back of the quilt.  The shot cottons are very pretty, but they fall apart if you breathe within a 3-foot radius of them.  I tidied up the back a bit, but pulling all the threads would have taken hours and I know in my brain that it doesn't affect how the quilt looks when it's done, so I refrained.  I hope the recipients really, really love it, but I know that I worked really hard on it and am pretty happy with the technical bits (sharp points, perfect corners), so I feel like I've done my part. 


I owe a lot of babies quilts right now.  The preemie twins may make it home before their due date, so it's a good thing I have one quilt ready to cut and bind.  I have nothing to bind it with, but I'm sure the stash will provide. 


This quilt is done in what has become my standard baby quilt pattern - the middle is a 6x7 grid of 5" charms, then there is a narrow-ish white border with a wider-ish border of one of the fabrics in the quilt.  I bought a bunch of random charm packs and am throwing some stash in where needed.  Did not love using a fabric that reads pretty light as the border of this, but this fabric happened to have four colors used in the rest of the quilt (pink, blue, green, and gray) and was pretty much the only thing I had yardage of.  

I have another charm pack that I could use for the other twin quilt, but it doesn't coordinate at all with these colors.  Would that be weird?  I could probably use more Connecting Threads charms to come up with enough for another top, and I could duplicate one fabric with this quilt.  Lord knows there are other babies that I could use the other charm pack for.  

It's nice to have an open design wall for the moment.  On to the next baby quilt. 

Happy crafting!