5 tops, 3 days

Blue ridge Beauty. 

I have Gretchen to thank for sending me down this particular rabbit hole. Once she started cutting pieces for hers I just had to jump in too. This used up a tremendous amount of blue scraps. I kept all the blue 2" squares very light, as I had heaps of these in the stash and scrap drawers. What I found, time after time, was that these blues have faded badly over the years, with the fold lines showing up as yellowing lines. I just cut around the faded bits, and discarded all that. So it's just as well they have been all used up. Some will probably fade in the quilt, but if it takes another 20 years for that to happen then I'm OK with that. Hopefully this will have spent 20 years on a bed by then.

The Boxy Bow Ties got a cheery green border that serves as a nice frame for the blocks. This was a very successful leader-ender project, in that it took me a long time to finish the blocks. Usually I just end up sewing the leader-enders as a new project, but this stayed happily in the background. Again, it used up a huuuge amount of little tiny scraps, and completely cleared out the neutrals from my 1.5' scrap drawer.  

Nearly Vintage Stars was a spur of the moment decision to use up some very old block parts. I dug around in the scraps to find pieces from the same era, and some treasured pieces found a home here. I would say that I have very few of these left in my stash, and it was nice that most of them found a home here. I'm calling it Nearly Vintage because there are a lot of fabrics here that are between 20 and 23 years old; not quite vintage, but getting close.

The British quilt is finished, in all it's drab glory.

It doesn't photograph well, looking merely murky, but in real life it's just what I was aiming for. Muted and subdued and under-stated. The border fabrics are some of my Preciousss ones, hoarded for just such a quilt. I'm well pleased with this.

I'm including the little cot quilt in this post, even though I've already shown a picture of it. It's just for the record, of my 5 tops finished in 3 days. I hope I never let the borders mount up like that again.

Whew, what an effort. Our shop, where I was working, is across the road from our friend's coffee shop, and her excellent coffee kept me going. I needed to take a break often, wrestling the bigger tops through the machine was quite a workout. I'm so glad we have such a good sewing set up.