finally something that feels like progress!

After what felt like weeks of small increments of progress on the Woodland Wonderland, I have a finished top!

Taking the photo this morning gave me a backlit effect, but you can see here it is clearly done.  I love it!

(And you can see the 400,000 half square triangles I mentioned last week.)

I went out looking for a back for it this weekend and found nothing I liked.  So the hunt continues, but that means the tiger will go on the longarm today.  (I'm not looking forward to that, but it must be done.)

Once the Woodland Wonderland quilt top was finished, I dug right into Blockstep.

Cutting seemed to take forever and I mathed wrong (I'm making the quilt a size between two given on the pattern), but finally I had all the pieces cut, randomized and ready to sew.

These go fast!

I'm more than halfway done with blocks already, after just two sessions of sewing.  (One of them rather short.)

Here is a sample of the two blocks that make up the quilt.  I'm worried that it will be too random and look goofy, but there's no way to know for sure until I'm done.  So onward I sew.

Last week I mentioned that I'd pieced the back for Tiny Stars with the intention of quilting it Monday.  And I did!

It's a monster for sure!  It's HEAVY, but what do you expect?  It's got over 1000 tiny blocks in there!

I wanted to do something fairly simple, so I decided to do something like an orange peel design, but not the full peel.  I thought it would go fast.  I thought it wouldn't use much thread.

Yeah.

After a few sections, it was NOT going fast and it was using a LOT of thread.  Then I realized, I was basically quilting every inch.  On a quilt that's nearly 100 inches square.

So yeah.

Seven bobbins.

(I thought I was gonna hit eight, but I just squeaked it in with seven.)

At least it was simple.  And the longarm behaved beautifully.

Here's the back, after quilting, of course.

If I had gone back and done the other arc, it would have made the orange peel whole, but I was trying to miss where the thicker seams were and this motif fit the bill perfectly.  (Not that the seams are THAT bad, but still...)

And here's how it looks on the front, with one of the few lighter background stars to help see what I did.

I don't have a whole-quilt photo, but it's also not done.  I pieced together leftover binding parts and sewed them on to the quilt, but haven't touched it since.

I'm hoping the multi-colored binding doesn't ruin it.  I did have more of the grey (the second grey I bought for this, though none of those blocks are in the photo - these are all either the first grey (swirls) or leftovers from my stash that were used for fun) and debated using that, but decided this whole thing is so scrappy, it would be silly to use something that all matched.  I hope I'm right.

So this waits, but the worst part is done.  It took quite a while, particularly because I needed to turn it 90 degrees after doing all the lines going one way.  And even more so because I miscalculated (or the fabric shrunk in the wash) and didn't have enough extra on the sides of the quilt to load it properly.  So instead of adding a leader onto the edges (do I even have anything I'd like to sacrifice that is 100 inches long - twice?), I quilted and buried threads for the outer four rows on either end so I could load it close and still get to where it needed to be quilted.  (Maybe not the best solution, but a solution and it worked.)

It took the better part of Monday - dinner was even delayed a bit - but it's quilted.

In other news, my cats do not want to come inside, even when it's raining...

Our warmer weather has been slow in coming since that one week where it was nearly 80 every day (about a month ago), so the window to the cat run has not been open much.  Last Friday it was nice enough, so I opened it.  And then it clouded over and started raining.  These two were both mad and didn't want to come in until it REALLY started raining.

Thankfully the warmer weather has returned (this time I think to stay), so they'll have plenty more time to play outside in the coming months.

Time to quit stalling and go quilt that tiger!  The hubby has requested tiger footprints, but he wants them with claws...more like a bear print from the photos I came up with.  He is not getting that.  I'm not sure I can do either of those effectively, so I'm debating between a leafy meander or maybe following the piecing.  The latter might get tricky, as there are some really thick seams where a lot of skinny pieces come together, but we'll see.  Once I get it loaded I can reassess.

But it feels good to have so many of the quilts from the list moving forward (or even done)!  I knew I'd get there, but at one point that list was scary.

Happy quilting!

Katie

PS The next-up baby quilt (due date has been moved back to December 6th from the 23rd) will be for a boy.  I suspected as much, but I suppose I had a 50/50 chance anyways!