Woo hoo! Some finishes!!

Man, I've been putting my nose to the grindstone and working on getting some things done. After going through my UFO's and lists, I decided to really buckle down. Real life is going to get in the way soon though, so I hope I can continue knocking these out. This is what I finished yesterday. The Leaf Challenge: Although it meant a challenge to work One Hour a Day, per Judy, this quilt was one of the more challenging to me. NO--it wasn't hard--I made MORE mistakes on this quilt, due to inattention and being in a hurry and not double checking my measurements than I have made on any OTHER quilt! LOL When I started this quilt, I thought is was so serindiputious (I know that's not how you spell it, but my spell checker is on break!)that I found all these maple blocks in the right size from another project I had put away. Piece of cake I thought! And I had all these bonus triangles! Woo hoo! I plotted it all out in EQ6 and away I went. I thought I would add an applique leaf in the plain squares. Nah, not that good at applique. I'll photo copy leaves from my yard! Great idea--put the block fabric behind the leaf, so it looks like the leaf just fell on the quilt. Great in theory--oh, the leaves looked fine, but my color printer depicted the background fabric a bit differently. Oh well, good enough. But OOPS! I did NOT know that the June Taylor printer fabric shrinks 1" after washing! And guess what? I planned on the whole width of the fabric sheet. Now what? I had to dig in the trash, pull out the trimmings and sew them on two sides of my block to make it work. Not a great start. But I fixed it and moved on. Things are moving along until the nezxt to last border...why doesn't it fit? Oh look--I made one of the borders narrower than I planned and now my pieced triangles dont' fit. Of course, there wasn't an even amount of triangles that I could easily hide an insert. But what else is a girl to do? Fast forward to last week...okay, time to get her quilted. Oops! I do think I have a piece in there backwards! Dagnabbit! I tried to justify it as my humilty block..but I have had enough humble experiences with this quilt, I don't need a glaring mistake on top of it. Take it out, put it back in correctly. Now to piece the back...oh good, here are the measurements. Even though I had to piece the back with two different pieces,looks good. Stitch them to the leaders for my HQ16. Hmm, do it again (backwards doesn't work!) Load the quilt and then the backing and hey--what's wrong? I don't know where I got my measurements, but they sure weren't for this quilt!!! I had to take the leaders off, find more fabric and make the back larger--now it looks really wierd! I almost was afraid to quilt it knowing that the history of this quilt meant more mistakes were to come. But no problems and now it's done! Yee HAW!

My little Snowmen in Trees is an OLD, old top. Kind of simple but fun. I thought it would be a perfect piece to practice using my rulers and special gadgets to outline things. Wow, it's a good thing this isn't an important quilt! Do NOT, I repeat, DO NOT enlarge this picture!

Let's just say that I need a little more work! My hats are off to the longarmers who make their quilts look SO good! I USED to be pretty good on my regular sewing machine, but this is another whole ball game!

My last quilt, Stained Glass Iris (a class sample using bias tape) is a wallhanging that was ALMOST done, except for the border corners. I used my own hand dyed fabric for the flower and borders and was trying to figure out how to eek out enough to make a 9 patch in each corner so it looked like it was woven. I had used too much of my fabric and it wouldn't work. So I put it away--10 minutes from being done! Silly me! I finished it, quilted it, bound it, labeled it and took a picture. Geez, what's wrong with me sometimes? Do you ever do that? Get something SO close to being done and then put it away. And then when you finally do get it out and finish it, you wonder what your problem was? LOL I know that sometimes 'obstacles' in our way are discouraging and bringing it out another day, with a clear head, helps us overcome those obstacles and we can bring closure!

And how was YOUR day?