It has been a whirlwind couple of weeks around here, packed with activities and work pretty much every minute of the day. I’ve been trying, successfully I may add, to get all of the back logged quilts done, so that I can devote August to getting my own projects done. In addition to that, there was a sewing day at the guild a couple of Saturdays ago, during which we finished up a comfort quilt top,
and I also finished up the body of the blog sampler.
I then, well, not really right away then, but sometime in the last couple of weeks, got that same comfort quilt quilted.
Then a week ago today, Gail came over and we sewed together another comfort quilt.
Maybe I should explain these a bit. The Friendship Star squares are being made by the guild membership. The colours are assigned, for these last ones the colours were grey/yellow and aqua/red. The members make the blocks in sets of two, with the colours in reversed placement in the blocks. The comfort quilts are intended for guild members who are going through “life altering” situations, whether it be illness, family loss, business loss or other sad situations. Each comfort quilt gets a label like this.
In addition to this, I’m trying to get the blog sampler quilt finished. It now has the inner border and the pieced borders on.
One more set of borders to go, and it is done. The picture was taken earlier in the week. I don’t have an updated one with all the pieced borders on, but you get kinda the idea.
Then this past week, we had company. Avery came to stay with us for a couple of days. He arrived Monday night, and stayed until Wednesday evening. We went on an adventure to the park on Tuesday afternoon, along with Grampy and Aunt Becca and cousin Abbie. Aunt Becca went on one of the fun swings with him,
while Grammy took the pictures and Grampy watched with Abbie. These were the only pictures I took. The rest of the time was spent enjoying being with him. I must confess to a small amount of exhaustion after her went back to his Daddy, though.
After this, I got serious about getting La Passacaglia quilted. I’m doing concentric circles in all the rosettes.
It is a long, time consuming process, but I’m hoping it will look great once it is done. It just might get finished tomorrow. And of course, through all this, there has been lovely time spent with this precious baby girl.
She is crawling all over the place now, and is pulling herself up, using whatever she can get her hands on, in order to stand. Another couple of weeks and she’s going to be cruising around furniture. And she only turned 7 months yesterday! It’s difficult to get a good picture of her these days. She isn’t still long enough. SO, that’s been my life for the past while. Too busy living it to write about it. Will it slow down in the next while so that I can catch up? Hard to say, but not likely.
I’ve figured out the stitching path, and I can go from one side to the other without stopping now, which is a big added bonus. 
Much faster, and less thread ends to have to tie off and bury. It’s time for a break for something to eat, and then I’ll be back at it again this evening.
It’s waiting on trimming, as well, as I ponder how much extra to leave around the edge in order to be able to get binding on without cutting off all the triangle points. I used a very simple quilting design called Ferns, 
designed by Barbara Becker.
It’s a Rose hexagon designed by Judy Allen and Jessica Schick. I have a stencil for the border using the same rose that I bought years ago. Maybe that’s why the roses in the hexagons caught my eye.
It’s kinda hard to see the design in the border, but the picture can be biggie sized if you click on it.
It looks so very much better in person than it does here.
It’s almost halfway done. I didn’t put any borders on this piece, and the half square triangles go right out to the edge. It’s going to be a challenge to get it bound without losing triangle points. There will most likely be quite a few points cut off..... oh well.
and off the machine. The binding is made and sewn onto the front of the quilt. Now comes the long, slow process of hand sewing it to the back. I usually do my bindings by machine, but after all the hand work on this piece, it seemed appropriate to do the binding to the back by hand. 
I’ll plant myself in front of the gymnastics competition in the olympics, and stitch until it is finished.
and I also finished up the body of the blog sampler. 
Then a week ago today, Gail came over and we sewed together another comfort quilt. 
Maybe I should explain these a bit. The Friendship Star squares are being made by the guild membership. The colours are assigned, for these last ones the colours were grey/yellow and aqua/red. The members make the blocks in sets of two, with the colours in reversed placement in the blocks. The comfort quilts are intended for guild members who are going through “life altering” situations, whether it be illness, family loss, business loss or other sad situations. Each comfort quilt gets a label like this. 
One more set of borders to go, and it is done. The picture was taken earlier in the week. I don’t have an updated one with all the pieced borders on, but you get kinda the idea.
while Grammy took the pictures and Grampy watched with Abbie. These were the only pictures I took. The rest of the time was spent enjoying being with him. I must confess to a small amount of exhaustion after her went back to his Daddy, though.
It is a long, time consuming process, but I’m hoping it will look great once it is done. It just might get finished tomorrow. And of course, through all this, there has been lovely time spent with this precious baby girl. 
She is crawling all over the place now, and is pulling herself up, using whatever she can get her hands on, in order to stand. Another couple of weeks and she’s going to be cruising around furniture. And she only turned 7 months yesterday! It’s difficult to get a good picture of her these days. She isn’t still long enough. SO, that’s been my life for the past while. Too busy living it to write about it. Will it slow down in the next while so that I can catch up? Hard to say, but not likely.
It’s supposed to be a multiple of six, and I was supposed to have 66 stitches. Imagine my surprise when I finished the first round of the pattern in the textured section and found that There were three extra stitches. I got all bummed out, and tossed it into its basket and it sat for a while. Last evening, I went over to Gail’s, and I didn’t feel like dragging my sewing machine over, and I did’t feel like doing hand stitching, so I took my sweater. If there is tinking to be done, it’s best done while chatting with someone to take the mind off the fact that the knitting is going backwards. Happily, the tinking went well, and the textured section is now progressing. I only went back to the plain knit section and fixed the too many stitches by decreasing by three in the last plain stitching round. No way was I going all the way back to the beginning of the sleeve. No one but me will know once it’s done.
so I hauled out my GO cutter and my 2 1/2 inch scrap strips and cut a whole pile more 2 1/2 inch squares. 
Tomorrow is the guild’s sew-in day, and I plan on doing sewing that involves frequents starts and stops, so my supply of two-sies that will then become three-sies will grow. I love the process of making quilt units for a new piece while working on other quilts. The new one grows almost by magic.
I’m back at working at the London Friendship Quilters Guild blog sampler again. In the past week I’ve done up six blocks. There are only 2 left to go, then I can start sewing it together, hopefully at the guild’s sew-in day on Saturday.
