Life with a Pickle

 Exciting things have happened!  First, the cutest thing:

We think he's going to be one of those couch potato Australian Shepherds, as he is generally mellow and calm, unless it's midnight and you're trying to sleep.  He's getting better at sleeping through the night, albeit on my head, and is generally interfering with Crafting Time less and less.  

The next exciting thing is that I've now longarmed for the first time!

I attempted "dwirling," although the result was not really identifiable as such.  The free-motion was really all over the place, and I didn't feel good about it as I was doing it, but it's not obviously horrible on the finished quilt.  Plus, I'm going to wash the finished quilt for maximum shrinkage, which should hide the stitching a bit.  I do love how even the stitches are, I loved getting the whole thing quilted in one (long) go, I loved not having to wrestle it through my machine.  And the place I'm using has really, really good rates.  

In the future I should definitely measure both the top and back.  I rarely measure when working with a whole quilt, because I don't really have room to spread out a big quilt flat at home.  I do all measurements relative to the quilt itself, i.e. laying the back down on the bed and laying the top on top of it and seeing if there are at least 4" around the edges. 

Piecing the back was a chore - I sewed together the remaining 4" strips, first in random order, then ripped a bunch of that out and pooled into warms/cools and sewed those together.  I had a lot left over after making the top and bottom borders for the quilt top, so I pieced those into the back in such a way that they wouldn't mostly get cut off.  Will take a picture once the whole thing is bound, but you can see the warm strip in the pic above, which is between two much bigger chunks of fabric on the back.  

For binding, I planned to use more Kona Navy, which is what the triangle squares are on the top.  I'm very low on the Kona Navy I've had on hand forever, so I was glum about ordering some more even though I've used my quarterly buying day for the Fabric Fast I'm doing with the Quilters Knitting group on Rav.  Couldn't find another fabric I'd have enough of to do the whole binding and that looked as good as the Navy would, but then I realized that the super bright rainbow wide backing I'd gotten last year would go well enough with the rainbow-y-ness of the top.  It's not my favorite fabric, but so little of it ends up showing that I decided to go with it, rather than wait.  

 Finally, I've gone back to cross-stitching:

It was a bit accidental - I downloaded some patterns to support Ukrainian designers and then just happened to have some dark blue embroidery fabric on hand and then this kind of started and then kept going.  The pattern is here.  I definitely started it too close to the top, but with careful finishing it should be fine. 

So that's what I'm up to!  Hopefully I'll have a finished quilt to post soon.  

Happy crafting!