Shiver me timbers!  An arctic freeze passed through our fair town today and temps were in the 50’s this morning. As I was picking up a few things in the backyard I came across one of many sights of spring.

I don’t recall what this is called, but it ends up making enormous leaves and covers a pretty large area.  I noticed next door our neighbor’s azaleas are in full bloom.

I could’ve spent the entire day outside.  I’m still waiting for some of our other spring flowers to make their appearance, but it’s right around the corner!

I learned so much from other members at the machine quilting bee the other night.  Among the tidbits was a new book that someone brought titled “Secondary Designs By Judi Madsen”.

The short story here is it’s micro quilting to the nth degree!  When I first started quilting The Splendid Sampler quilt (does everyone else put that in Capital Letters When They Blog About It?) I basted the top within 1/4″ as usual, then put on the channel locks to sew the first straight line across for the top row of blocks.  By channel locks, I mean the $9.99 version available – which work great by the way!

In fact, for each row, I put on the channel locks – which forces a perfectly straight horizontal row – to keep the quilt even.  And in doing so, I skipped right past the top border because I didn’t know what I wanted to do yet and didn’t want to rush it.

All I knew was I wanted to make a sampler of the quilting also, since the blocks are sampler style.  And so when I flipped through the book last night, that’s when I knew what I wanted to do – create a standalone border that would challenge me and make the edge pop.  This isn’t the best section I could’ve taken a photo of – the heart and swirls are sub-par but it’s a representation of trying.  And after nine hours….I was done with one side!

I started to begin the top border (that’s the bottom border if it isn’t obvious) but knew I’d had enough for one day.  I drew out my design, quilting the triangles first, then the micro quilting, then the horizontal lines and piano keys before coming back and quilting the other vertical rows and alternating circles.  Now that I’ve taken notes on what I did, hopefully the other 3 borders will go faster.  And yes, I will be unloading and re-loading to rotate the quilt so that the side borders become the top and bottom borders.  I at leaast learned that from En Provence!