Gingham Zen

In a week chock-a-block with meetings and appointments there was little or no opportunity to sit and stitch. Until Friday. I had my car in the shop for a brake job and when they called to say that they needed more parts and I wouldn't have it back for a few days, it sounded like house arrest to me, but in a good way. The perfect excuse to slow things down.

I wasted little time cutting a hot pink gingham bias binding for the yellow star quilt. It felts SO good to sit and be soothed by a little hand stitching.

As I worked my way around the quilt I came across a few joins in the outer binding that I'd forgotten about. There were three in total, and as luck would have it, the way that I had cut the strips allowed me enough flexibility to get great joins on two of them.

I'd also taken a stab at joining the butterscotch check that I used for the backing. It's not perfect but I was pleasantly surprised with how well that went too because it was done while burning a little midnight oil to get it ready for the quilters.

Here's a close-up of the narrow striped border. It just makes me smile that there are little red stars in it, a nod to the larger white stars scattered throughout the quilt.

The quilting is simple diagonal lines with a little bit of an echo within each of the stars so we were able to get this one quilted in record time. It might be a pattern to remember when we're looking for a quick finish in the future.

The last stitches went into the binding today. I'm delighted that it's finished and itching to have more hand stitching to work on. But there's the blue and yellow QFS flimsy on the design wall and I think I'll focus my attention on getting that together to free up some head (and wall) space first....M