It's Been Awhile!

I've been busy finishing up baby quilts, quilts for charity and my floral challenge.  This quilt is one I did with my friend Dianne for Handmade with Love, a charitable group.

I finally finished all the quilting on the floral challenge quilt and I am very pleased with how it turned out.  I went with very little quilting in the flowers except in the centers.  It was a fun piece to make.  I just have to sew down the facings and put on the sleeve now.

This is a picture I took with my  phone of my computer screen.  I have had fun using Electric Quilt (EQ8) to diagram all the blocks minus one from the Farmer's Wife quilt books -- that is over 200 blocks altogether!  I didn't do the swastika block on principle.  It was fun trying to solve the puzzle with each block of whether they were nine-patches, four patches or something different.  

This quilt and the following ones are all baby quilts.  Three of them use those troublesome blocks I had in some different configurations!

They also used my newest shortcut which has changed my feelings about borders forever!!  I no longer attach borders to the quilt until AFTER I do the machine quilting in the center.  When basting, I leave a few inches on all sides of the backing and batting.  I have found that the borders look much, much better and flatter and never have to be measured to make sure they are the right size.  You just have to make sure the border is  longer than the side.  I then iron them firmly down before attaching the binding.

Each of these is 40 x 40 inches. Except for the last one, they are all hand dyes.  I washed the with white fabric to make sure there would be no bleeding and there wasn't any at all!