The latest quilt wasn’t technically in my 2017 UFO pile – because I had bought the kit in 2016 at the quilt festival…and never even started it!  The kit wasn’t cheap; I think it was over $150 and only included enough fabric to make it 40×48. They call it a lap-sized quilt but that’s about the size of a baby quilt in my opinion! I couldn’t believe my luck when I went through my stash and found blue fabric that was identical (it had enough of the orange) and I always have white on white handy, so I felt like I made this quilt for free since I bought it so long ago.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I added a Pro Stitcher to my long arm a couple of months ago.  Wow does that ever make the quilting go much faster and I love how it basically eliminates imperfections. I could’ve quilted the borders with a separate pattern but decided to do an E2E (edge-to-edge, pantograph, all-over…whatever you prefer to call it). I found a pattern that spelled out “You Are Special” and thought it was perfect for the occasion.  Only problem was, I hadn’t learned yet how to crop around applique.  The 4 blocks have heavy embroidery in them that wouldn’t have looked good to be quilted over. I figured it out in short order and had the whole thing quilted in no time at all.

I thought I would never enjoy quilting someone else’s quilts but I have to admit, I have quilted quite a few charity quilts for our guild and now I am really enjoying it, at least the all-overs. There are an endless number of quilting patterns to choose from and I’ve even designed a few myself which I’m slowly getting the hang of. I had a couple of friends from my hometown ask if I would consider quilting for them so I’ve finally had the confidence in my work to be able to say “sure!”. I probably shouldn’t be posting pictures of other people’s quilts though; one was 110×110 and had prairie points in it. I realized if I could quilt that one, I could probably handle anything – haha!

In the meantime, we had a hard freeze that lasted a couple of days, which pretty much never happens this far south.  We found out the hard way that we had a pipe on the exterior of our house that burst. There is a 2-inch gap between the house and the brick column built next to it. I don’t know how he managed to do so in such a tiny space, but since it connected to a faucet outside that we never use, the plumber just capped it off instead. And best of all, it only cost $50! That could have been so much worse.