Off my groove.

I'm about 4 days off from the calendar.  Harley Dude had a flare up of a chronic health issue that resulted in 2 Emergency Room visits over the weekend.  Why is it that we never get really sick during office hours?  As of noonish today, he's on the mend...thanks for asking.

Sometime Sunday (it's all a bit of a blur) I finished quilting the Ice Melt / Broken Glass quilt.  It's back to  two names because now that it's quilted, the concept of the ice melting on the lake  is  working for me again.  When it was just a top, the stitching lines and the difference b/w the piecing and the white 1/3 were really evident.  Now, and particularly from a distance, it flows.

I used a poly batt that I had in the garage (obviously 10 years or more old, since I've become a batting snob in the past decade) and some light blue fabric from the big bins (almost certainly cotton and likely 15 or more years old.) for the backing.  I pinned it all together, and used the walking foot and a verigated blue thread.

I started the quilting process the same as when I did the crazy pink project, following the outlines of the key shapes.  Sunday, when I got back to the process, I wasn't loving it.  So I flipped it over and started quilting from the back side with the intent to get an even distribution of those fairly random lines.  That turned out to be a really good decision.  I had also under-pinned, as it turned out,  and there was a lot of bunchiness.  You perfectionists would have completely freaked out and pulled out your seam rippers.  I, on the other hand, kept sewing.   I knew that the cotton sheet fabric I used for the white fabric was notoriously wrinkly and hoped that would hide a host of ills.  And, for the most part, it did.  To be sure, I ran this through the serger to finish the edges then washed & dried.  I plan to square it up again before I bind... maybe that way my randomness will seem more planned.

I'm still working of UFO's.  I have more of the Ojibwe quilt basted (in the ER). I have 24 hand-pieced blocks from the fabric Nadine sent to me, ready for a round of black borders.  I finished 1 frame worth of JC quilting, which brings me to 23% finished.

My blog-buddy Heather thought of me when she was looking at some green batik in her stash.  I was trying to explain the concept of my next planned original design project when I decided to pull out the green batik collection that I gathered this summer, for this photo.  It will be self-bordered leaf applique (conceptually like the columbine blocks) made out of fat quarters.  I won't be using all of these, and certainly not with this distribution, but it does show the concept that I'm working on, with a variety of textures and color to set off each block w/o sashing, but still being cohesively green and batik.

I also have some concepts for the challenge quilt that I've been doing with Ethne.  But that's a whole different post.  Maybe next weekend.