March Accomplishments

March has been a very interesting month.  So many cancellations and trying to minimize how much I'm out and about.  I still get my daily walk in although I'm trying for earlier in the day when fewer people are out.  That hasn't worked so well the last couple of days because I am definitely a fair weather walker when I have a choice.  Its rained the last few mornings and cleared in the afternoon. 

My goals for March's OMG was to quilt Milkweed 1 and 2.  Both of those got quilted at the beginning of the month and I was able to take them to the show at the Monday sewing group before that got cancelled.  The biggest problem was how to quilt the background of piece 1 but I ignored that until the flowers and pods were all quilted and suddenly thought quilting the flower shapes in the background would work well.  So I grabbed a spare flower shape and traced around it and that was the quilting for Milkweed 1.

For milkweed 2, I had written words I wanted included in the quilt.  I'd thought of embroidery but didn't want that much stem stitch to do so I practiced quilting words on one of my spare quilt sandwiches, then wrote the words on the placement overlay I was using to align the quilt to see the distribution and then wrote them with a quilt pencil on the top and quilted them.  This quilt also has flower shapes were background quilting was needed.

I'm thrilled with how both of these turned out.  If you get a chance to take Jane Sassaman's Abstracting from Nature class, grab it.  I've two more pieces planned from that class.  I've started work on Milkweed 3 which will be summer.

Also in March I finished and submitted my Trendtex challenge piece for the Canadian Quilters Association show.  I didn't get it mailed before they asked us to hold off mailing for the time being so that is sitting on my couch to be mailed when I get the go ahead.  I'll post pictures of that quilt once the challenge is completed.  I'm guessing it will be sometime in the summer.  I did have fun making a binding with a bit of red peeking out on the right side. It is actually a nice red.  Its looking a little orange on this monitor but it is red

I also finished two old UFOs.  The stain glass laser cut from Dilys Fronks was purchased in Oct 2014 and the background chosen in Nov 2014.  Its been waiting to be quilted ever since.  It was on my UFO list for 2017 and is finally completed.  The shimmering tulips was a kit I purchased at our last guild show in 2015.  I put the top together about a year ago and finished quilting it this month.