Lake Haus and Home Again

It finally happened! My parents meeting Glenn's for the first time.

Because I just got back from a week at the Lake House (no Keanu Reeves in sight), where I did a whole lot of sewing. By hand!

How pretty is that?

Yes, I'm back to working on the Just Takes 2, if only for the week while I was up in New Hampshire. Since I was going to be lazing around on the lakeside, I decided to take a stab at sewing this block by hand (and at my fingers--they're just starting to heal!).

And it all seems to be good.

It was a little challenging, especially since I've never done this much hand stitching, but it's really no different than applique when you get right down to it. In fact, I'd almost say it's easier, because you're allowed to go all the way through the fabric.

You can see the lines I'm using to line it all up.

Working on this project made me really want my own quilting space; it was nice to have the whole table at the house to work on, and the minute I have wall space for a design wall, you can bet it's going up!

Getting there!

From the back.

Of course, there were a few minor oopsies; I wasn't using my usual iron, and we found out it had a tear in the cord about halfway through, so I wound up working without an iron for some of this and for the Flying Geese block that I also did.

Nice!

Now, I'm not going to show the center medallion until I've had a chance to fix it, at which point I'll show the before and after. I mucked up the procedure for it, and I'd like to redeem myself before you think I'm just awful at this stuff. :)

Flying geese without an iron. Not bad!

The Desert Bus quilt is back!

After the Lake House, I had to return to the Desert Bus '12 quilt. It needs to be complete 100% by mid-September if I mail it from the US, and by October if I mail it from Canada. I'm going to a conference that first week, so I might bring it with me on the plane and just mail it from within Canada to get it through Customs that much faster. We'll see if it's going to work or not!

The arrows. How pretty is that?

I realized after working with curves and hand stitching on the other block that I could easily do the work for this quilt on the machine with a template. Originally each arrow was two halves, right down the middle. This was unfortunately a huge pain to sew--a messy acute angle corner, almost impossible to work with, and just plain unfun. After the compass block above though, I went into EQ 5 and built a template that resulted in a much cleaner, much more accurate block that was beautiful when finished. Check out the top border below!

Definitely worth clicking on for the full zoom.

I've got the top borders all finished, and I'm going to finish the side borders tonight. Then I can start work on the centerpiece and the bus itself. My goal is to finish the top by the end of August (totally doable), the quilting by the end of September, and the binding the first week or so of October.

I'll be back next Sunday; I'm quilting every night this week to try and make enough headway to stay on track, so there will be plenty of content to be shared!

Would people be interested in the pattern for this quilt when all is said and done? I'll post the templates I used at the very least, just so people will have access to what I used for their own projects.

Have a lovely rest of the week!