This past week, my quilting attention went mostly to this lovely Optical Illusions quilt that I am quilting for a client. She made it for her 16 year old grandson. I felt a little intimidated by it at first, but this has actually turned out to be so much fun to work on. The center part is just straight line quilting through the intersections, in such a way as to enhance the 3D-ness of the piece. It’s just really cool. I’m doing all the black thread parts first, and then I will switch and finish up with the white. All I have left with black is the very outside border, and whatever I end up doing in the inner sashing. The outside borders will be the same as the pattern I put in the inside border corner pieces.

I’ll share pics of the whole quilt once I get it off the frame. I had to take a pause on the mermaid I was quilting because my client ordered little eye and mouth appliqués that she wanted me to stitch onto the face and we are still waiting on them. One of those times zippers on my longarm leaders came in handy. I was able to zip it off and lay it on my guest bed in the meantime, and move on to the next client quilt.

Last week, my Sunday Funday sewing time ended on a down note. I thought I was zipping along, making good progress on the diamond star blocks for my Barn Star Sampler. I was working on assembling the four corner units for each of the two blocks. Well, I don’t know how I goofed up so badly, but I sewed a total of 32 half square triangles into their units backwards or upside down. Good grief! I spent some quality time with my seam ripper, and felt for sure the pieces would then be distorted enough that they wouldn’t go back together nicely. I finished redoing them this afternoon, and I now have all 8 corner units done, and they didn’t turn out badly at all. The next step is to make 16 elongated flying geese units. Hopefully, I will get those sewn together without mishap. 😂

I’m no stranger to the seam ripper, but that was a much bigger mistake than normal. I’m ready to get these two giant blocks behind me. I was supposed to have finished my blocks in February, and then assembled the quilt top last month, according to the QAL schedule. Obviously, I didn’t make it on schedule. This block is month 9, so after it I have blocks to do for months 10 & 11, then the mini filler blocks and top assembly for month 12. I haven’t decided if I’m going to custom quilt it, or do a pretty edge to edge on it. I’m kind of leaning to doing an all over edge to edge. We shall see when I get there, I guess!

I’m curious to see how noticeable the eclipse will be here tomorrow. We are not in the path of totality, and that suits me just fine. Sounds like it’s going to be crazy in those areas with so many flocking in to see it. I find them (eclipses and gigantic crowds) kind of unnerving for some reason, so I’m just fine staying where I am, and going about business as usual.

I did get some exciting news from an area quilt show this weekend, but I’ll share that in an upcoming post! If you’ve made it this far and are still with me, thank you for stopping by!