Sew Fine and Bottom Line threads, quilted on my longarm, freehand, slightly wonky on purpose.

The edge is an applied, single-fold binding, pieced to match up with the piecing on the front, the corner miters were sewn.  It was just as much of a pain in the ass as it sounds.   But effective.    And yes, I did then stitch on top of hte binding multiple times in order to flatten it out.

Two layers of a linen blend batting.  It’s really thin stuff to begin with, even WITH two layers, and with that much stitching, it is very thin, indeed.  I’ll use the linen again, and not quilt it quilt so closely together to see how it drapes.  This little thing doesn’t drape, it flops, but it’s exactly the way I want it.

Now, what’s next?

After a really productive Thursday, Friday was almost a complete waste.  I felt kind of yicky for part of it, and I just couldn’t make anything happen, so I spent a lot of time reading, and then we had to go get groceries and school supplies.

Yesterday, though, I got back on the horse and got the pebbling done:

The home stretch, before:

And after:

(Sorry for the weird lighting and angles.  It was dark.)

I also went for Plan B and a half on the lettering.  It’s still Plan B, in that I’m using the appliqued letters, but I ended up hating the way the hand-stitching was looking, so I ripped that out and started doing a narrow zig zag on the sewing machine:

Not that you can tell in the picture.  Again, the lighting was wonky, so it doesn’t look like much.

Today, being Sunday, I excused myself from having to work on customer quilts, so I’m just playing on my mini-quilt now.  The lettering is all done, and I’m part way through quilting.

I’m sort of moving through molasses today, though, as it is my least-favorite time of year:  Ragweed Season.  I should have been dosing myself with Flonase before now, but I haven’t, so it hasn’t taken full effect yet…and I have supplemented with some Benadryl today.  (Yes, I know there are non-drowsy antihistamines available.  No, they don’t seem to do much good for me.  But that’s OK, I like taking naps).

Part of the point of the mini-quilt was to offer myself a carrot to get through the pebbling.  The other point was to see if I could pull myself out of the non-quilting I’ve been doing.  I’ve been doing so much non-quilting, I’ve wondered if I still had the right to call myself a quilter.  The other times I’ve tried to kick-start, it was with big quilts and I couldn’t see any progress.  Working on this tiny piece has been good to get the juices flowing — I have another quilt starting to form in my head.

Back to the flag quilt.  Or another nap.

To catch up: part one and part two and part three and part four and part five.

So, I didn’t get any further on the mini-quilt last night, because I was kidnapped.  The boys DEMANDED that I leave the house and the FORCED me to go to a free movie and partake of free root beer floats.

I was worried, as you probably recall, it was really hot and humid last night:  but remarkably, with the sun gone, the heat was better, plus a breeze picked up, and at times it was almost cool.  Almost.

See, it’s the Winding Stairs Festival this weekend, and the kickoff event is a free movie out at the baseball complex — someone has one of those big rear-projection screen thingies.   The set it up in the outfield of the softball diamond, everybody brings blankets/chairs and we sit out under the stars (and a couple of meteors from the Perseid Meteor Shower!!), and watch a movie.

There were also free hot dogs and free root beer floats — which were incredibly yummy.  Plus, we got to keep our HUGE 24 oz super heavy glass mugs.  I sprayed on the Off, but a few skeeters got through my defenses.

Thanks to the late night, I’m having a sort of slow start to the morning.  Had to exercise, clean up, and sit around and moan about exercising.

And now?  I have to eat my words.

…there is no chance in that hot place that I’m going to applique letters that tiny…I’m not that crazy.  No, now it’s time for some embroidery.  First…though…I can hear the whip being cracked…better get some more quilting done!

Because it turns out I’m a big fat lying liar.  I started embroidering, and…hated it.  So I decided that I really am crazy enough to applique tiny letters:

And I’m doing it by hand, no less.

Unfortunately, I haven’t actually earned the time I’ve worked on it this morning, yet, so I’d better get going on my pebbling.  I am hoping to have the pebbles all done today.

It may take a fair amount of bribery in the forum of

1. time to work on my mini-quilt
2. chocolate
3. caffeine

I won’t be reporting as often today, but I’ll try to at least let you know how far I get on those crazy little letters.

Crazy.

To catch up: part one and part two and part three and part four.

So, this installment is a little delayed due to the fact that (a) the boys wanted to go to the pool and (b) they thought they needed to eat supper before they headed out to football practice.  (Which, by the way, will be very HOT.  Uck.  It’s like Mother Nature knows it’s the weekend of our town festival, and thus she must turn up the heat to the high 90s as well as the humidity.  It’s like a bazillion percent humidity out there.  No joke.  Digression:  back in my misspent youth, I worked in Boise, ID for a summer.  It was really stinking hot, but it was dry.  I always had to laugh when everyone started to wilt when it was like 20% humidity.  You have not experienced humidity until it’s pushing 100%. Further digression:  ID stands for Idaho.  IA is Iowa.  Geographically challenged people get them confused sometimes.  I suppose if I squint and look at them funny, I can see how you could confuse them, but…in point of fact, they are two different states, in completely different parts of the country.)

So, where was I?  Ah yes:  further progress.  On the machine quilting front, I am now down to 3 half feathered wreaths, plus part of a quarter feathered wreath, and then the rest of the pebbling.  Oh, and the borders.  But that’s a lot further along than when I started this morning.

On the mini-quilt front, as I suspected, I did get the top together:

Look familiar??

My mini-quilt is not exactly a miniaturization of the original, lap-sized quilt.  It’s more of an adaptation.  The little one will measure 14 by 20 (ish) when it’s finished.  The big one is approximately 56 by 72 (ish).  The original quilt has pieced blocks in both the red and white stripes, but I decided that in this smaller version, it would be less distracting to have just a plain strip for the white, rather than the pieced triangles.

Of course, there is something missing from the little one, yet…but there is no chance in that hot place that I’m going to applique letters that tiny…I’m not that crazy.  No, now it’s time for some embroidery.  First…though…I can hear the whip being cracked…better get some more quilting done!

To catch up: part one and part two and part three.

After a little bit of lunch (leftovers), and a slight sidetrack while reading some blogs (read an article about a guy who had done a bunch of experimentation to recreate the Animal Style In-n-out burger (which I’d never heard of…well, In-n-Out burgers, yes, animal style, no…), which led to an article about the same guy who did all kinds of experimentation to figure out how to recreate McDonald’s French Fries.  The Internet is awesome, no?) and then back to work.

The end of the pebbling is not exactly in sight, but it grows ever closer.  I have some more feathers to do before I can do any more pebbles, so that felt like a good time to take a quick mini-quilt break.

I meant to press my HSTs and then only trim a few, but then I got carried away, and now all 32 are ready for the next step:

(Those are trimmed down to 2.5 inches square, so they’ll finish at 2 inches).

As I mentioned before, the quilt itself isn’t very big, so it’s entirely possible that during my next break, I’ll actually get the entire thing assembled.    There is going to be some embroidery, and then of course it needs to be quilted, and depending on how the pebbling goes, I may just pull off the big quilt and take care of this little thing later this evening.

We’ll see!

But for now, my boss says it’s time to get back to work.  She’s such a drag.