Argh! It always helps me to let a quilt hang for a few days so that I can see if I’ve messed anything up. This quilt is 96×96″ so sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, so I took a picture of it and it was immediately obvious that the dark red fabric had flowers in some sections but not others.  That’s driving me nuts so I’m going to take that off and sew another piece in there. I texted it to a friend and thankfully she also spotted a couple of 2″ blocks which were incorrectly rotated 90 degrees. I thought I was done…and then I found one more spot! This quilt has its fair share of 1 and 2″ squares so I guess overall I sewed most of it correctly but still….

In other news, the leader of our quilting bee mentioned that Angela Walters was having a free motion quilting challenge. She gave a pattern which involved 9″ squares, cutting some triangles to add some extra negative space and then on week 2 the quilting started.  Week 2 was just 2 forms of stippling.  Then week 3 was continuous curves – orange peels and 8 pointed flowers (I’m sure there’s a better name than that for them). This week was meandering leaves with echoing around it. I still need to do this week’s but at least I’m almost caught up which is saying something since I just started this week on it.  I was busy finishing up that first quilt.  There is a little bobble in one corner in the mitered section but it’s all practice so no biggie to me since this quilt will never leave my house.

In the meantime, I went to a training class for creative borders and corners and learned lots of good stuff.  This is the coolest thing – did you know that 3M or some type of company like that makes yellow tape that has the inch markings on it?  I bet they also make one in centimeters.  Anyway, as an example if you’re working on a border and you want to add piano keys every inch but don’t want to measure every single one and know you probably won’t be as close if you guess, this is perfect.  I can think of all sorts of uses for it so I am definitely going to pick some of this up.

And it turns out that Handi Quilter also makes a hopping foot specifically designed for use with rulers. It’s called a Sure Foot and it may be a little difficult to see in this picture, but the part of the foot that lines up against the ruler is a nice, high even circle the entire way around.  The default hopping foot curves a bit in the back so while it’s easy enough to use a ruler from the front or right side with it, it’s not as easy when you are doing ruler work on the back side of the shank. We had a break in the action for lunch so I went out there and grabbed that before I forgot. I plan to quilt the heck outta that top quilt so I know I’ll be using rulers in various sections.

And last but not least, I bought a QuiltWorx pattern a few weeks ago when they were having a sale on their website.  I haven’t done one of their patterns before and while it is very detailed, the lingo is also challenging.  I thought I was all signed up to forge ahead but I think I’ll take a step back and put that one on the back burner for now until I can either take a class for their specific patterns or at least spend some time talking to someone who’s made one to get some guidance before cutting anything.  So in the meantime, I got this dumb idea I should make a greyscale quilt that’s probably 90% 1″ squares.  And it’s almost 100″ across so yep, that makes it 100 1-inch squares for each row. It does have a little bit of blue in it but not much.  My sewing room has officially been taken over by carefully labeled Ziploc bags! I am definitely getting my money’s worth out of that 1.5″ strip die from Accuquilt.