I'm still feeling a little buzz of accomplishment at having done so much sewing last week. Probably some of you think that because I make my living from quilting I have loads of time to quilt. I don't. I spend a lot of time at the computer doing business stuff, filling digital orders, answering questions; then I also spend a lot of time mailing out orders, running to the post office and the bank, running my son around to where he needs to go. Right now I'm designing my catalogue, which is taking a lot of time and energy and isn't even near done.

I'm not complaining; it's what I love doing, but it adds up to more than an ordinary working day. I tend to fit the sewing into strange pockets of time like just before the evening meal, or early in the morning, or late at night. My DH goes to the pub for dinner twice a week, and I spend those nights at the machine, sometimes for 5 hours straight. I feed the boy, and then I'm free to do some intensive stitching.

I think my finishing jag last week was a result of frustration that I never get anywhere, never have anything to show for all my efforts. I was grimly determined to get those UFOs out of my sewing room and off the guilt list. And I did! But the 9-patch was the final flourish; I walked away from the machine thinking I'd rather clean the toilet than sew another border!

The eight 1" borders on the Roman Stripe were sewn together into one larger border, and then joined to the quilt and the corners mitred. That was the easiest way; I don't mind all the joining of strips, but I hate man-handling the whole quilt. I only had to do four seams with the whole quilt involved. Incidentally, that border used nearly 2 metres of fabric, which is quite astounding. There's a lot of fabric lost in the seam allowances; great stashbusting border.

I make a folded mitre and then handstitch the edge down later; can't be bothered trying to machine sew that pesky seam, and by handsewing it I can make all the seams match perfectly.

The Roman Stripe I will quilt on my Janome, just plain ditch-stitiching. I love plain quilting sometimes, and I just want that quilt textured with no quilting showing. It doesn't seem too big to do myself, so I will try to fit tht in sometime soon.

The single Irish Chain will be quilted with this pantograph, Clover Meadow; it's my favourite of all the new releases I did last year. It will live on our bed during the summer months.


The blue-green quilt will go on the panto pile for the next time I visit a friend with a longarm. I really like pantos, I like the overall texture and pattern.

The 9-patch one, who knows. I haven't even thought that far; it can just sit with the pile of other tops. There are about 15 of them, folded neatly with their backings and just waiting for me to get round to them.

And I think I need to turn my attention to the pile of quilts waiting to be bound. There's 9 of them at the last count. Even if I made all the binding it would be a huge step in the right direction.

First one will be this scrappy blue 4-patch that I made last year. I decimated my ho-hum blues with this one, really cleared out the pile. Which can only be a good thing.