Wish You Well Complete!

 This is a 2020 Block of the Month designed by Gail Pan.  I had the top completed in January, but just recently completed the quilting by hand.  I am attaching closeups of the blocks to show the quilting as I did a lot of various quilting patterns through the quilt.

March and April

January and February

May & June

July & August

September & October

November & December

Blocks of the Month - July

Today I finished the two blocks for the Val Laird BOM, Gentle Gems, for July.  I don't think I showed the blocks for June, so showing all four now. 

And here are the July blocks for the Gail Pan, Bring Me Flowers BOM

I have also started a new quilt designed by Katrina Hadjimichael, called Spike and Specks.  This will be a quilt for my niece Cindy.  

All three of these designers are from Australia.  I do love the designs by many of the Australian quilters.

Coronaville Finished!

 Yes, I finished my Coronaville quilt, just wish the pandemic was also finished.  At least I do feel more protected now, but the Delta variant is bad news.  

This is the front of the quilt.  I call it a topsy-turvy layout and that is the way 2020 felt.  So much stress and turmoil is lots of areas of our lives.  I centered the block with an embroidered cross representing my faith that I relied on to get through the year and continue with all that continues even today.

 Here is one of the blocks just to show a close up of the quilting.  The little house in the right corner always gives me a smile, I call it the Nut House - Mr. Peanut lives there.

Here is the back of the quilt.  My first layout had all the house kind of going in a circle around the center block.  But that turned into a tragic mistake when I tried to get it to laydown flat for pin basting.  Intially I went ahead and pinned it, thinking I would just quilt the pleats flat.....but then after 3 hours of pinning and going to bed  exhausted at 11:00 I could not sleep just thinking about how awful it looked.  So I get up, unpin the quilt  and start ripping out the stitches...until 2:00am, and then I went to bed.

Got up at 5:30am and finished ripping the back apart, coming up with a new layout and three days later, I had the back completed.  Big sigh of relief, it laid perfectly flat and I liked how it looked. !

Excitedly I re-pinned the quilt and started machine quilting it along the sashing and wondered why in the world my pins were in upside down????  I machine two sides of two of the sashing strips that ran length wise before I realized my problem.  I was quilting on the back!!!!! Well that would be why the pin were upside down.   Sigh, had to rip all the quilting back out.  You see the blocks on the front are

 11 1/2" square and on the back the blocks are 9" square - thus the sashing on the back and front do not line up and I wanted the front sashing to be quilted.   Big laugh here - after all it is topsy-turvey. 

This is the label on the back of the quilt.  I completed making the backing on July 2, and the Covid statistics at that time were 183,526,684 cases worldwide with 3,913,586 deaths. In the United States it was 34,561,404 cases and 620,645 deaths.   Today as I write this post I checked the stats again (one week later).  Cases are now 187,501,030 cases and 4,046,629 deaths worldwide; that is an increase in 7 days of 3,974,346 cases and 73,043 deaths.   In the United States  the increase over the 7 day period was 164,855 new cases and 2,180 new deaths.  The numbers are just overwhelming, so hard to comprehend.

Here is the quilting as it shows up on one of the back blocks with no houses.  My original plan was to do this free motion quilting.  After three attempts I gave up on that method and went with my jumbo stitch handquilting using #5perle cotton and a size 20 chenille needle.  Hard on the fingers, but I please with how it turned out.  

I started this quilt on March 13, 2020; the day SC declared a stay-at-home lockdown and planned to make 1 house for each day of the lockdown.   I cutout pieces for 64 houses thinking that would be plenty, haha.  By the time I reached 120 houses, I decided to keep going and reduced the size of the house and kept on sewing.  I made the front of the house with the first 120 blocks and decided I would continue making until I received my second Pfizer shot - which turned out to be 218 days later on February 14, 2021.  And the pandemic continues, with rates starting to go up again as the Delta variant spreads around the world and people still refuse to be vaccinated.  God help us.

 

Staying Busy

 Seems like each day I stay busy either with grandkids or my quilting - but don't seem to be getting much done.

I did finish two baby quilts made with the cutest elephants.  One is yet to be hemmed, but I am taking it with me to the July guild meeting to hem there.  It will be donated to the guild outreach program. This is the pattern I used,  by Wendy Sheppard.  I did modify the design a little to make a baby size quilt and added eyes and tails to my elephants.  I also used EQ to draw the block and then created paper piecing patters, as I so have trouble when piecing to get my quarter inch seam just right.  This quilt was a lot of fun to make and I can see another full size quilt in my future.

I have also been working on my Coronaville quilt, trying to get it quilted.  This has been a very challenging process for me.  I think I have made the most mistakes on this quilt than I every made on all my quilts put together.  I will do a post on this one next...just need to finish the quilting process.  This is a peek on how I am quilting the blocks with what I call a jumbo big stitch.