Playing Catch-up

A portrait of TC, using Papa's camera.

Just wanted to show off a pretty kitty I happen to know. :)

This weekend was my catch-up weekend; I knew I wanted to make some progress on the various projects I've got going on, and I even managed to do that for most of them.

The OBW quilt, all sewn together.

I finished all the assembly for the main part of the dragon quilt on Saturday. I was so stealthy, Glenn didn't even notice I was working on it while he was on his computer in the next room. Faith-Ann had no problem powering through the seams, and once I get things ironed out I'll have to start thinking about border fabrics.

As far as finishing the quilt, I'm thinking a thin, two inch finished width black border, followed by a scarlet red, then a black tone on tone wider fabric, with red for the binding. For the backing... Probably just a flat Kona cotton, most likely black. I'm not a huge fan of using patterned fabric for backings--I'd much rather see it on the front of a quilt!

Our guest star!

Ann and Lynn came to visit the apartment today--Ann's Featherweight was all tidied up, and it's always nice to get to see them. Plus I was really, really intimidated by the last block in the mystery quilt set, and after seeing a picture of Betsy's house I really wanted Ann's expertise as I tackled a new challenge, the dreaded angled seam.

Ann showing me the finer points of assembling angled blocks.
Is scurry.

 It turned out to be less terrifying than I thought it would be; the angled pieces didn't come in until the very end, so I could have had everything ready to go save for those last three pieces. But it was fun to spend time with Ann and let Baron show off once he figured out there were only two extra people, a perfectly acceptable number by his standards.

Ta-dah!

I might go back and try to re-sew the left-hand angled white piece, but we'll see how problematic it is when it comes time to assemble the quilt top. I'm turning into a bit of a mystery quilt lover now. The latest American Quilter has a pattern for a mystery quilt I might take a stab at in a few months. I need to work through some more of my fabric first!

My first curved seam!

Ann was surprised I waited for her to try the angled block, especially when she saw I'd already done the curved fan block! It was much easier than I thought it would be, especially since I went slow and took my time on the paper piecing and trimmed everything back before doing the curved parts. There's only one real oopsie on the whole block, but I'm willing to take that. I'm not the most anxious when ti comes to accuracy; as long as it looks fine, I'm happy.

Less exciting than the other blocks I did today, but still pretty.

I actually finished this block on Sunday, but after the blog post went up. I'm loving the neatness and the accuracy of the lines; again, my history with HST's and triangles in general has not been good, so I'm very proud of how these turned out.

I'll do a show off of the fabric I bought at Burkholder's this week, maybe Wednesday, but probably not until the usual time. I also have some good news--it looks like maybe, maybe I'll be getting enough of a return from the government to afford the nice camera I've been drooling over. We'll see! I also hope to have some really cool news soon, I'm just waiting for a few things to come together before I do anything.