I got some things done!

A.K.A Show & Tell

On July 4th, I dropped my Summer Breeze quilt off to get it machine at Phyllis Sponsellers house. I got it back last Friday. I am very happy with it. I decided I wanted to make a summer quilt out of it. What that means is that instead of using cotton batting (for warmth) I just used a white piece of muslin. This makes it thinner, and required Phyllis to play around with the tension on her long arm quilting machine. Although since it is a queen sized quilt, I thought that using the fabric instead of the batting would cut down on the weight of the quilt too, but it really didn't. It will have scalloped edges (which I have already marked) and it will be bound using the same "blueberry" colored fabric as the skinny border. I got the binding made last night and I want to start sewing it down tomorrow night. I need to get it finished because it will be in the Bangor, MI quilt show on September 20th.

Here are a few pictures.


This is a photo of the back of my quilt. When I was learning to quilt, I was taught to put just plain white or light color on the back of the quilt. A lot of quilters in my quilt guild use the scraps left from the front of the quilt to piece the backing of the quilt. So I thought I would give it a try. I've come to the conclusion that it's just not something I like. It's pretty, but to me I still see it as an awful waste of good fabric. Fabric that could be used to make other projects.

Here is a close up photo, so that you can see the heart design that Phyllis used to quilt my quilt.

A couple of months ago, I was cruising around on Ravelry and came across the blog of Sarah. She is a quilter and knitter. She had made her own "swift" based on another blog by Anne of Crafty Diversions. When I saw the plans for it, I thought "I can do that!" So I bought all my supplies, went down to the basement, marked all my cuts. When I went to drag out the compound miter saw that my dad had lent me, I discovered that he had taken it back. So, not wanting to let the project sit, I took it to work and asked our maintenance guru (Dennis) to help me out. He cut everything and drilled all the holes for me. I took it home, sanded it and put it together on Saturday.

Here it is:


I've already tried it out and it works great.