My first wall hanging quilt

It's Friday and I am so excited I can barely sit still. All I want to do is knock out the stuff that needs to get done and get home. I want to sit at my machine and quilt, quilt, quilt. It's so hard for me to stop sewing when I'm in the quilting stage of a project. I can walk away from piecing any time and can piece for short periods while I cook or do almost anything. But, when I get into the zen of quilting, that's all I want to do. The little flowers and leaves on my current project are coming out perfectly, now that I finally solved my thread color problems. When will I learn to work on a sample project to work out the bugs before I put my real project into the machine and have to rip out stitches, which despite how careful I am always causes damage to the fabrics with pulled threads. It makes them look just a little bit dull and I'm hoping that will come out in the wash. It usually does, but you never really know until it's washed and blocked. I'm using a different batting this time. It's a bamboo batting and every where it touches a fabric, it leaves a fine lint, so I've had to roll the backing over the extra batting and pin it down all around the edges.

Okay, back to the topic at hand. This was my first wallhanging and my first kit quilt. I made it for Rob's birthday in 2006. The kit was called Hip to be Square and it came from Keepsake quilting. It's all batiks and in the original design, there were all these 6" log cabin blocks that had just one round around the center block, alternating with 6" plain squares. While it was in the design phase, we decided not to use the plain squares and make the log cabin blocks for the whole quilt. It made it very busy, but we love it. I especially love the colors, the purples and the greens, with just a bit of pink, gray and black. It's quilted just in the ditch and in all the years that it has hung in the living room, I've never gotten around to adding the label. But, I know exactly where the label is. Just never got it sewn down.


And, finally, I want to plug someone else's blog. Leah is doing some fabulous things with free motion filler quilting. This is exactly the kind of quilting I want to do. She's set herself the challenge of coming up with a new free motion filler pattern every day for a year. That's really ambitious and I'm in awe of the 35 she's come up with so far. She provides a video to go along with the pattern and instructions. I'm planning on using at least two of these in the quilt I'm quilting right now. If you love to look at beautiful quilting as much as I do, check out her blog. I'm certainly going to keep an eye on her. http://freemotionquilting.blogspot.com

Y'all have a great Friday and enjoy the weekend. We'll see ya' round blogland! Lane