I started the hand-quilting on the spaceship quilt and managed two finishes last week. The first is a Schoolhouse tabletopper. It was the first project of 2015 with my quilting partner, ShaRee. She has a book with a zillion table topper patterns and keeps talking about wanting to make some. Our local quilt shop had kits of this one so I gave her one for Christmas and got one for me so we could work on it together in January and February. She is a retired kindergarten teacher so it’s apropos. The piecing was SMALL so we learned some stuff. I hand-quilted in the ditch around all squares and most elements.
I also finally finished hand-quilting and binding on the Candy Shop quilt. The pattern came from “American Patchwork & Quilting” Issue 79 April 2006 p. 70. This quilt has quite the provenance. I began purchasing fabric in 2008 after my first quilt. Not knowing that 100% cotton fabric isn’t all made the same, it has a variety of fabrics from many manufactures, some of which are of dubious quality, causing stretching and wonkiness. I slowly cut and pieced the blocks here and there until finally last year I decided to get it off my plate. I hand-quilted it with an all-over random swirly no-pattern free-form thing I usually do. I trimmed the sides harshly to make it come out straight and unpicked and re-sewed parts of the binding four times to make it look mostly straight and finally decided it was as good as it was going to get. I’m not thrilled but it’s not too bad and still a fun quilt. Maybe someday I’ll make it again with quality fabrics. Sounds like a good scrap quilt.
Now for the accident portion of the post. After thirty years of sewing I put the sewing machine needle into my index finger on Friday afternoon. Are you kidding me? I was piecing a quilt top and pushing the fabric through and somehow, although I’m not sure exactly how, I pushed my left index finger up under the foot. The needle went into my fingernail and sliced through the end of my fingertip. I managed to save the quilt top and the carpet from the spurting blood. Yay! Got the bleeding stopped and had my nurse friend look at it and help me with how to care for it.
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