Liberated Finish

I hope you all out in blog land aren't too tired of seeing this project.  I took the last stitches on it this weekend and aside from a sleeve and label, this is finished. Here is my Liberated Amish piece that was a blogger challenge set up by Tonya over at Lazy Gal Quilting. We looked at Amish quilts and Stars and Bars was my inspiration.  As for the letters, this was my first attempt.  This was a bit of a therapy quilt for me, new beginnings, trying new things.  I really didn't, and still don't, like the word Survivor that is tagged to anyone that has dealt with cancer.  I like the word THRIVE.  Doesn't it sound much more positive?

 The top was finished in June of 2010, thank goodness that quilting didn't have that deadline!

 The liberated stars are a la Gwen Marston.  Since there was Amish in this challenge, I knew I had to quilt feathers.  This was my first attempt at hand quilting feathers, they really are easy.  I did straight lines through the stars.

and I used the star piecing for my border lines.  With the piecing for the letters, there were some thick areas to quilt through, so the straight lines worked very well.  I love how this piece turned out.

Hope you get some stitching time this weekend.
Sharon

Lib Amish Hand Quilting

I've made great headway this week with some hand quilting. No, the binding isn't finished on my nephews quilt, I didn't get all my 30's blocks cut up and prepped, but I'm ok with all that because I did get the feathers finished on this one.

You know when you do something thinking it will look right and be right, then you do it and something keeps nagging at you? Well, that was me with this project. I have been quilting the feathers with rust thread, #004 YLI, and was using black to stitch large X's through the stars. Now there is no black thread in the stars, just rust.

And now it's right. At least for me, and that's who I'm doing this for.
The end is in sight and I will continue to see this project to the finish line before I pick up any other hand quilting.

Have you checked out Victoria's show in NYC. It's pretty fabulous to see many of her pieces hanging together.

Hope you had a good week and that you get in some stitching time over the coming weekend.
Sharon

Liberated Revisited

I'm farther along that I thought I was. I abandoned  set aside this piece to focus on my GOT swap 9 patch.  That piece is finally finished, and this is the "next in line" for hand quilting.

I have to draw the feathers up one more black column.

It's ok to have several piecing projects on the go at one time, but I find with hand quilting I have to stay focused on one piece in order to feel that I'm making headway.

I'm going to do straight line quilting through the stars.

Freehand baptist fans will be stitched in the top and bottom sections.

I haven't touched this piece in months, yet when I picked it up, it was just like an old friend. You know what I mean, the ones you only talk to every few months yet it feels like you just visited with them the week before. That's a good feeling to have.
Hope you get to take some stitches today.
Sharon

Plodding Along

I've been picking away at different projects so there are not great strides being made on any one thing. I did finish this one last week. Click on the photo for close ups.

Here is a close up of two blocks. They finished out at approx 11" wide and I used a 1" strip, finished at 1/2" for the spacer and did stitch in the ditch along each side. I did the stitching with Hobbs 80/20 batting behind, so I didn't add any when I put the back on and stitched along the spacers. Being a small project, I used 2" binding.

After looking through lots of books I have decided on my log cabin layout. 144 blocks and I've made my decision. I've started to label the blocks and have 4 rows sewn together. This will be my summer quilt, it's going to be a perfect fit for my bed. I'll post a picture when the top is all together.
I've joined in the Liberated Amish quilt blog, you can see it here. I only have small amounts of time at my sewing machine so I've been picking away at these liberated stars. I'm using a pack of hand dyes that I've had for far too long. I'm loving how this project is progressing. The liberated lettering is going to be my challenge, I'm pondering words for this and nothing has struck me yet.

It's Olympic time....so I'm committed to working on my Hexi's. I've had a huge AHA moment, and now I have a handle on the design process of putting the hexis all together. My background is the red and since the weekend, I've got  these three rows on the right trimmed and ready to join together. I want all my flowers to this stage before I do any more joining, this way I can have control over the color layout.

20 down and about 65 more to go. This means I only need to make about 250 more red hexi's.
And on a closing note, Canada's first gold medal on Canadian soil, how spectacular and thrilling to watch. They played it over and over on tv, what a wonderful story about this young man and his family. Spectacular!

Sharon