Quilt Finished!

It is finished! This is the front.

This is the back. Not nearly as lopsided as I thought it would be, but a bit off center.

Here's a shot showing the corner detail. It's about 45"x57", what we call a TV blanket at my house, or a lap quilt I suppose.

Now that the quilt is done I will rejoin my regularly scheduled life!

Wednesday Night & Thursday Day Quilting

So here I am on Wednesday night hand tieing the quilt. Except when I was done with it I didn't like it. And it bothered me. And the back was very crooked to the front. And I was going to have to do a LOT of trimming to make it work. And I didn't like it. And that bothered me. I felt like I ruined my quilt.

So I got the kids off to school this morning and came home and looked at the quilt. Then I did some testing with some scraps and tried machine quilting. It looked like my machine and I would be able to handle it, so I carefully cut out all the ties I'd done. And I carefully repositioned the top, batting, and back. I carefully pinned. And I even more carefully machine quilted. And the front looks GREAT!

And the back... well, it doesn't look too bad in this picture.

There are a couple of puckers. But the big deal is that the back is shifted from the front. I'm not sure how that happened. But now I understand why every other quilt I've seen has a solid back. I'll post finished pictures when I'm done. I'm hoping to trim and bind tonight!

Wednesday Day Quilting

This morning after dropping D off at preschool I went straight to the fabric store and bought sewing machine needles, black thread and some batting. Then I came home and did this:


First border around pieced front - tiny red strip.

Then I put on the 2nd and final border for the top. That's when I measured the top and realized it's an inch bigger than the batting I bought. By then I'd already emailed my mom about the batting and had almost talked myself into returning it anyway, so now I'll return it for sure. This time the batting will be bigger and NOT fusible.

After finishing the front I moved on to the back. I had a big chunk of red fabric. I trimmed off pieces to made a binding strip for it. (Let's hope I measured correctly...) and then I was left with a piece about as big as the pieced part of the front. I have 3 sets of strips to sew around that red chunk to make the back. The first strip is silver. I got that one finished just before I had to leave to go get kids from school.



This picture is the back laying centered on top of the top. This would have been my first choice of backing, but I'm out of black material and don't want to buy more. Actually, my true first choice would have been to just use one piece of material for the back, but I don't want to have to buy more, so I'm piecing strips. I think this part is pretty fun and it's going fast. I've got two more strip/rounds on the back and then on to batting and binding and tying/quilting.

Tuesday Night Quilting

I sewed the squares together. Then I sewed the groups of two together to make 4 square blocks.

Here are the blocks of 4 layed out.

Then with much thought and more attention to detail than I thought I had I sewed them all together.

Here's a shot where you can see that I rocked out the corners. They are not perfect, but you have to look pretty close to see which ones are off a bit. (This was the part I was most worried about!)

Here's a look at the border I planned out. Much to my surprise, when I measured the quilt top and looked at my leftover materials, I have enough to make a big border and back the quilt! Here's the front border pictured. I mini strip of red paws and a wide strip of black. The back will be mostly the red plaid with a wide border of silver and then strips of black (using up the extras I cut). The binding will be the red material again.

Here's my trial strip of the red mini strip. On the quilt it will be between the quilt top and the black material. I just wanted to see how it would look sewn up. Good enough, I think.

I'm excited to get it done! I'm going to stop by the fabric store tomorrow and get the batting (and more thread and other general supplies) then come home and sew, sew, sew. I'd start tonight, but I'm tired enough that I'll make dumb mistakes and I don't have extra material!!

(Posted after midnight, in the hopes that my mom will look first thing in the morning! Love you, mom!)

Busy Monday & Tuesday Quilting

I was excited to have my sewing machine back on Monday, but ended up having a very busy day full of everything BUT sewing. I got a few strips sewn together and then finished the strips Tuesday morning.

Much to my frustration, when I measured closely, the strips varied from 6 1/4" to 6 1/2". Ugh. They were supposed to be 6 1/2. The majority of the places I measured the strips they were 6 3/8". So I was supposed to cut 6 1/2" squares and I changed that to 6 3/8" squares. It's all pieced squares, so I should be able to get away with that. My plan is to make 4 square blocks and measure again and see where I'm at.

This bottom picture is the squares all cut, and some of them laid out in the pattern of the quilt. I'm going to go tuck Gladys in and do some more sewing. Tony got a new guitar and is really wanting to play it, so I'm excused from being social for the night. :)

Cutting is done

I had a very productive morning! I even took pictures. Sharing here will save Tony from a play by play tonight. :)

Here you can see the strips I cut that I'll sew together to make the blocks for the quilt. (I am without sewing machine for the weekend, so this project is on hold until Monday...)

Notice there are two piles of black strips. After I cut out my "8 strips of dark material" I realized that I had the black folded in half... so I made two strips with every cut. I'll have to find a use for the extras.

Also, the new rotary cutter was totally worth it! And thanks to my mom, because she taught me how to use a rotary cutter a looooong time ago, and it all came back to me.

So here is the pattern I'm using. I was going to go for a rail fence, but changed my mind this morning and decided this would be more fun. We'll see how it turns out. I'm not noted for color selection.

Looking at the pattern, all of the middles of the boxes will be silver. The horizontal strips will be the red print and the vertical strips will be the black print.

Here is where I say "Never Again". Never again will I buy something so fussy to cut. Well, ok, if it turns out looking awesome, then it maybe was worth it. Cutting out the red strips, with little paw prints down the middle (school mascot is a panther) was a very time consuming task. I think the red alone took twice as long as the black and sliver together. Still, it looks good!

This is my scrap from cutting the red strips. They are less than an inch across, but I think I will find a use for them. Maybe in the border. I've never been one to follow a pattern 100%, and I think the border will be another deviation.

So, I'll be back on Monday with some sewing, I hope!

A Quilt Story

Many, many years ago I started a simple quilt and never did finish it. I asked my mom to finish it for a birthday, which she did, of course. (And she did a wonderful job, too.) Anyway, I pretty much thought that was the end of my quilting career.

Then my mom and my aunt came down and I took them to some quilt shops. Picked out material for another quilt I want my mom to make for me. :) And I kind of got the quilting bug. So I made a couple of pillows.

And I really liked it! So quilting, in small doses at least, has proven to be very fun.

Then I remembered the school carnival coming up. And I decided... hey, wouldn't it be great to donate a fabulous quilt for them to give away? So yesterday I rushed around after Jazzercise to squeeze in a quick trip to JoAnn Fabrics before I picked Zeke up from school. I got the material then, and ended up going back with David in the afternoon and picking up a rotary cutter kit (with my 40% off coupon, thank you very much!). So I'm all set and hoping to get all my cutting done today!

(I don't understand the spacing issues going on, so my appologies for the funky layout today!)

Adoption Pending!

We have an adoption date! On August 26 we will finish our year long trek toward adoption - 18 months after David entered our home, he'll become David Bockelman! Hooray! The pictures are from his first days here and very recently - how far he's come!

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We've had a lot of people say that he's lucky to have us, and we truly feel like we are lucky to have him. We're looking forward to finalizing D's adoption!

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In other news, a busy summer is over and school is looming in less than two weeks! Z will be in 4th grade, H in 3rd, G in 1st, and D will be finished with in home therapy services and going to half day preschool. I'm going to try to post more often for my mom, who doesn't want to join facebook. Love you mom!

Adoption News - moving right along

Good news on the Adoption front. We meet on Thursday to discuss our adoption subsidy and sign an Adoption Placement Agreement. The subsidy is getting the paperwork done to insure that David will continue to get state medical insurance even after our adoption and figuring a monthly stipend. The Adoption Placement Agreement is the paper we sign to take David out of foster care and place him into our home as an adoptive placement. Most importantly, this is really the last step before court. So I'm guessing we'll have an adoption date soon. This is one more huge step forward! Hooray!

15 Year Afghan - Finished!

I started this afghan about 15 years ago. It's actually the very first crochet project I ever started. That's 130 brown-eyed-susans/sunflowers crocheted over the years and finally assembled and border added. I still LOVE it. Much more now that it's done and not just hanging over my head!

My kids asked a lot "who is that for?" and, as always, this afghan is for ME. It's on laying on the couch now. Every memeber of the family has cuddled under it at one time or another! It makes me smile just to see it!