Progress

I seem to make great progress in everything but photography. The girls long ago confiscated my camera and finding it (charged) is a real challenge. Blog tonight...hunt down and add the photos tomorrow.

The past couple weeks I've been focused on the Joseph's Coat Quilt Along. I figured I could get a lot done over Thanksgiving weekend between the long road trip and lots of Football. Managed to get 9 blocks done, and parts of several others by the time I returned. By the end of this past weekend I was up to 15. Since the goal was to be at 6 by last week, I'm in pretty good shape. Doing the back-basting, needle turn approach is also saving a lot of time. I saw one post that estimated that it was taking 4 hours per block. I'm averaging 2.5 since I'm not messing with the interfacing, gluing and placement steps. It has also helped me to do multiple blocks at once. Since I'm working with so many colors it seems easier and faster to sew one color at a time. I'm prepping the next 10 so when they are done, I'll be over 1/2 way (49 needed total)

Still working on the Coral Reef Quilt. Ugh. I'm not sure I'll ever get done. I spent hours and hours this weekend with nothing meaningful to show for it. I did notice Sunday morning that I was almost out of the teal quilting thread. Drove to Hancock Fabric at half-time and was horrified to find that the didn't carry that color. Not even in regular thread. What if it was discontinued? Could I find it on-line? Could I send out a plea to my quilt blog friends to dig through their stash? How much would I be willing to pay if I could find it? Fortunately my anxiety was short-lived as JoAnne's is only 3 miles further and they had the needed color. I didn't even feel bad about paying full price.

I had planned on today being a day I could completely devote to quilting. Got de-railed until about 2:00, but then managed to put in about 3 hours on the Double Irish Chain quilt. Have 14 of the 25-patch blocks done. Now it gets tricky. This is a "stash" quilt, so there isn't enough fabric to do the whole quilt in the traditional 3 fabrics. White background is OK. A blue primary color I'm pretty sure I'll have enough of. But the 3rd fabric is going to have to transition into 2-3 fabrics. I re-designed the quilt at least 4 times this afternoon. The main 3rd fabric was left over from a fussy-cutting project which makes estimating the yardage pretty challenging. I think it's going to be some trial and error. Time to make peace with my seam ripper.