A good weekend

Virginia heat and humidity are here for the summer and that means a lot of staying in the rest of the summer. I don't garden (indoor or out) so I can focus my time on sewing, quilting, crochet and glass. this weekend was sewing and quilting-centric with a little side trip to visit my brother. It sure is nice having he and my SIL closer so that I can make quick afternoon visits. I also got to visit my friend, Marcy, to pretend like I was helping her upgrade the tensioner on her longarm. Really, we just visited and chatted because she had it all done already.

While there Marcy pulled out a box of (mostly) acrylic yarn. I brought it home to see if there was any that I could use. I'll box up the rest and take it back to her. She uses it when she teaches knitting. I don't really want to build a yarn stash but a few extra skeins will be OK, right?

I got this veterans quilt to together. This is the last of the Paula Nadelstern scrap fabrics for now. The next one is another Blockade with hand dyes and Kaffe shot cotton.

When I used to teach longarm quilting I spent a lot of time trying to help people get over their anxiety about starting a quilt. I had a few points that I wanted to make:
- remember, it's just a quilt, you aren't going to kill it
- if it's a bed quilt, it's more important to get it done than that it have the most absolutely perfect design
- save your anxiety for show quilts

I had to coach myself through this one. I had to remind myself that it isn't a show quilt. In fact, it's not really a quilt that I like all that much. I hate pink. I made this to occupy myself while watching football and traveling. It will most likely be gifted.

With that little pep talk I reminded myself that I like 2 kinds of quilting: ruler work and dense fills. So I just started and I got 2 corner and 1 border done. Those empty triangles will have the same fill patterns that I put behind the flower blocks. The empty diamonds will have 1/2" cross-hatching. I'm trying not to quilt too densely even though my tendency would be 1/4" lines.

I'm happy to be moving along on it and now I look forward to time at the machine. No more stress!

I won't be quilting a lot this week because I'm going to do some mosaic! My friend build a pizza oven and we are going to mosaic it this week. I should be able to post our daily progress but if not, you'll hear from me Friday when I return.