Doing some sewing

It’s finished!  My little “Cheri” quilt was hand quilted by Bellwether last year but was left unbound until last weekend. Having hand quilted quilts – no matter how small – hanging around in that unbound state makes one feel a little guilty.  And not in the guilty pleasure sort of way.  So, finally, I cleaned out the sewing machine area and bound all 50″ or so of this little cutie.  I love this design Cheri provided for free and I copied shamelessly right down to her idea to sneak in some rogue colors.  That mistake in the center left?  Cheri did put a deliberate one in hers but mine was definitely not a deliberate error.  It’s a legitimate goof-up.

I’ve mentioned it before that the way I get back on the sewing/quilting horse is to pull out my tiniest scraps and make one of these little – very little – quilts.  Again, this one was already finished but was just a top.  When cleaning out my sewing area for the other quilt’s binding I unearthed some scraps of batting and backing so I put this guy together and quilted and bound it.  It took an NFL football game to finish.  I did lay out and sew another one and it’s basted and ready for me to do more quilting.

Since I finished two entire “quilts” I decided it was new project time.  Cheri Payne’s design style is so inspiring and she provides some free patterns on her blog from time to time (I also bought plenty of her patterns, too).  This little 4-patch was posted in June 2011.  Cheri did hers with a black background and scrappy 4-patches.  When I saw it I immediately thought “red and green!”  It’s an easy quilt with easy directions but making those little 1-1/2″ 4-patches is kind of time consuming.  But it’s so fun to dig around in the scrap box and fabric stash.

I bought that green fabric when looking for greens that were not “poison green” at Little Quilts a couple of months ago.  Hmm, that pattern sure looked familiar.  It seems that when I find a good thing I keep going back for more.  I bought the blue when I wanted to do a blue and brown quilt for my son but it just wasn’t right with the brown.  Then I saw a basket pattern by Linda Sawrey at Temecula and was thrilled I had many yards of that blue.  The brown was a trial run for my Lemoyne stars but didn’t work for that.  It will, however, be going into another project.  The red is a lovely cherry red – not too orange – and the green, well that works so well in red and green quilts.  These are nice subtle but not boring prints and the colors are fantastic.  They are from the “Tavern” lines (Tavern Blues, Tavern Reds – get the picture?) by Paula Barnes for Marcus Fabrics.

That’s it for now but I am still doing some sewing and should be back for more quilt chatter soon.