Other Crafts Tuesday: Quilting!

So, this weekend, in between Waiting for Friends and Driving to See Friends (and amazingly adorable baby), I found myself looking at a shelf I'd forgotten I had. There were projects on it. One of them was a red/gold/green marbled-fabric chessboard, hand pieced, hand quilted. Or, rather, it would be hand-pieced and hand quilted, if I'd ever gotten around to finishing it.

When I had last put it away, I had carefully laid out the pieces, in order (remember, this is sixty-four small squares), and rolled up the paper towels. Since I had various blocks sewn together, more or less, in groups of four or more, I used two sets of towels, marking one "RIGHT" and one "LEFT".


(I even blogged about it, which I'd forgotten.) See, before, I was just carrying around some quilting needles, a small bag of fabric squares, and some embroidery floss left over from other projects that wasn't quite enough to use for anything *but* hand piecing, because it wouldn't last long in a cross-stitch project. (Maybe a TW - sometimes, you just need a few stitches in a particular color.) So, when trying to make sure that Block-of-Six-A didn't have the same colors side-by-side as Block-of-Four-B, I could give myself kittens.

This time, when I unrolled the paper towel, I could see which seams still needed to be done, and as long as I made note of which corner would be "up" and "left" of the seamed set, I was fine. Everything went swimmingly - so, I did a few seams Friday, a few Saturday, a few Sunday, and the FINAL ONE on Monday.


Then I needed to find some batting and something for backing. Now, I know these things are in my house. I even have a pretty good idea *where* they are in my house... they're just completely inaccessible at the moment. For a while, they weren't - I had the batting and such out in the main room, just in case I suddenly needed to quilt something, or stuff, say, a small knitted rabbit. Oh, and some binding. Something shiny and festive. And the gold thread I was going to use to quilt the design on would be nice, too, and the vanishing marking pen for the drawing thereof... all these things, and I can't reach any of them, but I really COULD finish this thing before the end of August! So, what did I do?




I ACTUALLY FOUND IT! I was able to reach, from the doorway of the craft room, both a roll of batting (the kind I actually wanted!) and the cloth I got at the 2008 Quilters' Expo. Of that cloth, there were two bundles of green, and of the "less olive-y" bunch, there were two almost identical pieces, so one of them is the backing - you can see it around the pieced board above. Really, it's a miracle I was able to find ANYTHING when I needed it in my craft room.




Anyway, I commenced the actual quilting, with the help of the right-sized set of Q-Snaps (ALSO FOUND!!!!), and just need to pick up some shiny gold binding on Saturday morning, and I think I'll FINALLY have one of my quilting UFOs off The List!