happy new year and another quilt quilted and a finish I can finally share

This new year has snuck on me.  Heck, the last four months have flown by and I feel like I've barely noticed.  How is that possible?!

This past week has been quite the rollercoaster...I've gone from healthy to sick to maybe healthy to still sick to kinda healthy again, but I think today I've finally turned a corner and, after two days of feeling better than the days before, hoping I'm finally on the mend.

But it's not the dreaded plague.  Not that it makes much difference in the fact that I feel like poop.

Oh well, at least I had enough presence of mind to read while snuggling kitties in bed, so that's a plus!

Friday last week I THOUGHT I was on the mend, and was feeling rather decent, so I decided to load up another quilt on the longarm.

This is another one that has been kinda nagging me to get it done and I was struggling with how.  I debated about doing a different motif in each arc (repeating between arc groups, but not within), but couldn't settle on what all to do.  Some were busier than others and would end up with a randomly puffy quilt and I wanted something more uniform.

Then Thursday night I had an idea.  I would do large, skinny loops from the base of each arc set through to the top and do some doodling inside.  Well that sounded good until I got the quilt out and realized just how wide those arcs are at the top and how narrow at the bottom.

But that led me to another idea.

Why not little bumps all across each arc?  Uniform.  Easy.  (Ha ha ha ha! My longarm disagreed a lot.)  Fairly fast.  (Again, the longarm had an opinion there.)

It took longer than I wanted, but I had a lot of thread breaks.  In the same position every time.  I'm sure there is an issue with the longarm, but I was determined to finish, so I dealt with the thread breaks (there weren't THAT many, but still annoying) and will figure out the longarm later.

I did get it finished, but not before the hubby made it home from work.  Oops!

This is another one that I haven't made binding for, but I'm thinking a dark grey or black would be a nice offset to the final product.  I haven't gotten to that but I felt absolutely awful on Saturday (I even called in to work!) and had family Christmas on Sunday, so maybe today?

Speaking of Christmas, my sister-in-law got me some awesome fabrics.

I haven't opened them yet, but they are super cute.

I managed to sew some cat hammocks, too, before I got sick enough to just stay in bed.  One of the fabrics had bananas on it.

I giggled pretty hard that I made banana hammocks.  (The other fabrics weren't as interesting.  Like plain burgundy.  Useful, but not so fun.)

And finally, the finished baby quilt for my niece!

It started out with finding this pattern that I loved.

Then I pulled some fabrics from my stash - holy cow I got the whole thing from my stash?  This is good, but scary!

And then there was a lot of cutting.

And piecing.

And laying things out...with help...  Of course.

It went pretty fast, considering.

In mid-September I had the top done and he just needed eyeballs.  I forced myself to do that right away so when I was ready, after much procrastinating, to longarm it, all would be ready.

I even prepped a back and made binding from that pile of stash!

And then it sat.

So, a few weeks ago, knowing that Christmas with the family would be a great time to give this quilt (she is due in February, but we don't see her often), I needed to get going.

One of the pictures I'd seen of this quilt online had a woodgrain motif quilted into it, with the grain going top-to-bottom, so that looked good to me.  Unfortunately my back was a size that I could not load this sideways and do the woodgrain going the correct direction - in my brain.  So it stalled.

Finally, after finding a semi-tutorial I liked that would provide me with a woodgrain-like design, I decided sideways would be okay and set to work.

It went fairly quickly and then it was done.

I went right up and sewed on the binding and in the following days did the hand-sewing portion.  It still needed a label, but I ignored that.  Those are quick, right?

And then Christmas got postponed.  My mom was sick.  So I had a bit longer to postpone that label.

Guess when I sewed it on?

Right before we left for Christmas that was postponed by a week and a day?

Yes.  Yes I did.

When did I get a photo of the finished quilt?

Right before I put it in the gift bag before folks started arriving at my parents for the celebration?

Yes.  Yes I did.

But I got it done.  And my mom got a good look at it before it left the premises, which she was happy about.

My niece, however, did not make it to Christmas.  Doing it on New Year's Day put a bit of a wrench in things, as her mom's family had plans that day.  My brother did make it out (he claimed he was hunting on my parents land, but mostly what I saw was him sitting on a couch, eating snacks and watching football with the family!), so he took the gifts (this and all the others) with him later that evening.

So technically this is my last finish of 2022.  The other quilts aren't finished, but I'm saving the binding for next Monday when my guild (what's left of it) has a sewing day.  It's easier to haul just a quilt that needs hand-sewn binding than all the other stuff.

And with that, I'm off to figure out lunch.  The hubby lost a crown last night and is off work for the holiday today, so I need to find something easy to eat while we wait on the dentist.

Happy quilting!

Katie