Mystery Quilts! And other quilt updates!

I hate pinning. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's why I get stuck at the border stage so often. It requires pins to make sure that I don't end up with wavy borders. And then I end up sticking myself so many times while sewing on the borders because of the pins. But without them, I have wavy borders. So I guess I have a love/hate relationship with pins. And also why I end up adding borders to a bunch of quilts all at the same time.

Last weekend, I finished the top of my Old Town mystery quilt. The colors are much more vibrant and harmonious in person. I find that cameras don't seem to know what to do with the color red. But I changed up the outermost border because I didn't really care for it in my color way. I think it looks amazing on Bonnie Hunter's quilt in her colors, but the black made it look weird in my opinion. 

So instead of the larger square border, I made another row of four patches. I'm crazy, because those squares are small! But I love how it frames the quilt and I might use that again in the future, but not in the near future. I need slightly larger squares for the moment!

And since I was in the "I guess I should just do all the borders now" phase last weekend, I attached all the borders on Good Fortune as well. Oh yeah, I finished all the blocks. Again, sorry about the lighting, it's been overcast for the last month or so it seems. Or it's sunny while I'm at work. 

But because I made the quilt larger to fit my bed, I had to do some math and adding another border to make the pieced borders work. So my Good Fortune quilt has five borders. Have I mentioned I hate pinning? But I pinned each and every one and it lays flat and I have no wavy borders, so it works, I just don't like doing it. 

Now I just have to find the right backing for this one. I have backing for Old Town, I still need to piece it together before I can baste anything, but I want something with a large floral I think. But I can't find anything in the right color/style so I may end up going with a solid backing, I'm thinking light blue as I want this to feel like a summer quilt. And I even know how I want to quilt it. But Old Town? I have backing, but no idea how I'm going to quilt it on my domestic machine, especially since I can't seem to get the tension right to free motion quilt. Not that I'm very skilled at free motion quilting, but I was halfway decent at loops with my old machine. 

My friend's baby is showing up the end of next month, so I figured I should switch over my machine to quilting and just finish the baby quilt I started. And since I was ironing a quilt top and backing, I dug out my Dresden Plate quilt and basted that one as well. The baby quilt I was able to quickly quilt in a few hours after work one day, but the Dresden Plates are going to take a while. Which is probably a good thing since I need to figure out how to quilt the next one. 

I'm quilting the Dresden Plates pretty densely. The plates are hand stitched down, and while I would love to hand quilt them, there is interfacing behind the plates and I didn't trim the white from behind the plate either, so that's a lot of layers to quilt through. But it took me an hour and a half to quilt one square. And I'm going to have sooo many threads to bury once I'm done. Thankfully I only made 9 plates instead of 12 like I was debating when I started it last summer. I think I'm going to quilt a braid through the sashing. The fancy sashing is asking for something more intricate with this quilt. 

But I think I'm going to share updates every other week. The way my work schedule is, I have time for quilting after work every other week. So the other weeks I don't really do much at all and don't have much to share. My free time is more fragmented those weeks, so I tend to do things like press a quilt top and backing one day and then baste the quilt the next. Or I might do some scrap management or sew a few things together that I laid out the day before. But I think it helps in a way prevent me from burning out. I can go crazy and accomplish a lot in one week (like finish two large bed size quilts), but then the next, I have time to reset.

Happy Quilting!