Sunday's 15 minutes

Today's 15 minutes of cleaning was gathering together all my free-motion quilting templates and feet into a single container. My friend, Kim, bought a new sewing machine and we are going to learn and practice together, so I needed everything in one place so that I can easily bring it back and forth.

Then I pulled out an old project and assessed where I was at. I started Pat Sloan's Splendid Sampler Block Party and my last report was February 19, 2017 where I left off here:

I did make 8 new blocks in January, but forgot to take pictures of them. I'm still working on embroidering some of the blocks above.

I'm finishing these in quilt-as-you-go method, and started one block at a time. Because my sashing is 3 1" strips, finishing at 1.5", it has taken a bit of figuring out how best to attach them. When I made my first ones, I realized I can't really add the full sashing on all sides. Once I figured that out, I've started to sew the blocks together, by sewing machine on the front and hand-stitching the blocks together on the back. I did sew 3 pairs together before the project got put aside.

 Today I sewed two of those sets together by machine-stitching the sashing together. I had two pieces of the sashing on the right-hand side of the second block in the row above, and one piece on the left-hand side of the third block, and by holding the batting and backing back, I was able to sew the 1/4" seam. Next I'll trim the batting, fuse it together with a narrow strip of one-sided fusible, and then hand-sew the seam of the backing. I'll share that in another post this week.

I then decided I could probably sew two blocks together before quilting them. These are some of my new blocks. You can see here where I have attached the side sashings in pieces. I've also only added a single row of sashing top and bottom, as this row will be designed to fit as the second row. The backing has been added to this piece and I seamed it as individual blocks to be consistent with the first row. If this is successful, I might branch to 4-block units.

In between creating the sashing pieces and sewing the pieces together, I settled on a Leader & Ender project to do. More on that tomorrow!

Sunday's time in the room: 15 minutes cleaning, 2 hours sewing and playing with fabric.