Finally Finishing

Finishing quilts is not interesting to me, so I don't often do it. That means I have piles of tops, tops and batting, and sandwiches all over my workspace. When I can no longer work, I finish a pile.

Here is a piece I did for our friends working in a Dominican Republic seminary. I met them in seminary. He was an amazing professor of Old Testament. I took 3 semesters of her Liturgical Dance class, and she was our fabulous chef in residence. Our dogs were best friends, too.
They moved down to the DR with almost nothing, and I noticed that their walls look pretty bare. So here's a little something to cheer their home:


These next two pieces are ones I started in Melody Johnson's workshop at QSDS. The one on the right is the first thing I dared to quilt (stitch). It was a piece I was willing to ruin, and I ended up liking it alot. I think it's going to replace the one I have in my office that was a Melody/Helen collaboration. The one on the right was so small I was afraid to finish it with a binding, so just pillowcased it. I think I'll send it off to my friends in the DR too. (Hmm...now that I see it in the photo, I wonder if it should be a wide orientation instead of a tall one. But ew, that would mean sewing another rod pocket...)



And here are two pieces I finished just to get them off the pile. The first one is also one I started in Melodie's class. I added a fortune from a cookie that I found inspiring. This was also an "I can loose it" composition, so I tried fuse binding it, just pulling extra material from the backing over and fusing it to the front. Good enough for "sketches" but I don't think I'd use it for a piece I hope would be displayed. The second is an extra block from the "Faith Hope Love" series. I've got enough to make 2 more long pieces, and then 4 (now 3) extra blocks. With this one, I tried just cutting batting and backing fabric (no fuser), ironing them in place, and sewing around the edge. There is nothing attaching them all together except the outside stitching. I found that it works fine on a small piece like this.



I also kept working on my largest piece to date, which isn't all that big. Maybe 2ft x 3ft. It's small random-sized blocks of 1/4 my hand painted fabric and 3/4 white made into the shape of a cross. I had used big white pieces to fill in the corners to make it square, but then Hubby couldn't see the cross. So I ripped them off and replaced it with some very light blue fabric I painted. The fabric I'm using is somewhere between a heavy gauze and a very light-weight loosely woven regular cotton. I machine sewed the small squares together and into the cross, then hand-stitched top to batting around each colored rectangle. I ended up hand sewing the blue onto the fabric because I couldn't figure out how to get into the corners with my sewing machine. I think it needs lots more quilting, I'm just not sure if I'll do it by machine (I kind of know how to do this) or hand (I know *nothing* about how to do this). Or could I use hand for the cross and machine for the blue corners? And should it be backed before I quilt? I think so.

Hmm...