Progress and Planning

Hi!  Can you believe it--the second week in a row I don't have a finished quilt top to show!  I've been kind of slacking on my personal projects because I've had other projects in my queue, and they've been top priority.  If that sounds super vague, it's because it is, and I can't really show off anything until next week.

After running errands today, I finished sewing the strips for my picnic quilt, which, by the way, is going to be way bigger than I expected!  I should have a new rule that, if it doesn't fit on the dining room floor, I can't make it.  (That would never stop me.)

Once all the strips were sewn and pressed (which is boring but necessary) I laid them out to get a feel for how the quilt should be pieced.  I didn't want too much repetition and I wanted a good representation of all prints and colors in each corner of the quilt--no clumping!  Even if this quilt won't be top banana I don't want it looking like I didn't care.

Here are some progress shots:

I left spaces between strips where I thought I needed more variety.

Oy--this is everything once it was said and done!  Also once the cats had run through it a few times.  Because there wasn't enough room, I stacked the strips when I had decided where they should be placed.  When everything was finalized, I made one large stack and rolled everything up together.

It's almost the end of the year, and I'm starting to contemplate how I'd like my final projects to go.  Of course everything could change--we're really hoping to move, but even if we don't, traveling for the holidays could take huge chunks out of my sewing time--but at this time, here's a quick list of my goals:

• Quilt Modern Maples quilt and this picnic quilt
• Make a gingham quilt based on all the ones floating around the internet
• Design/complete a triangle quilt (using solids?)
• Hand quilt something small

Did you see that last one?  Yeah.  Scary.  I've been intrigued with hand quilting lately and would love to do it on my Modern Maples, outlining the leaves in pearl cotton.  But I don't want to commit to something that large when I really don't know how to do it.  Of course, that hasn't stopped me in the past, but hand quilting seems so big and scary, much more so than piecing a quilt or machine quilting it.  I've thought about making a Modern Maples mini quilt (maybe for my mom as a gift) and practicing my hand quilting on that.  What do you think?

Here are some hand-quilting examples that kill me:

source

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Aaaand there are about a million others but the one picture I want to show is unattainable.  Seriously, how did this disappear?  If I can find it, I'll update!

What'd you make over the weekend?