Oliver's Birthday Quilt Part 7

We're at the final stage of assembling the top for Oliver's birthday quilt. I've sorted and rearranged all the patchwork blocks, and stacked them in sewing order. Now I'll put them together in seven rows of five blocks each:

Two tricks I use when sewing blocks into rows: I always mark the first block's left-hand corner with a safety pin, so I know where the row starts. I also add a post-it to each pile showing the row number and sewing direction so I don't sew them out of order.

Here's the first row of blocks sewn together:

And all seven rows sewn together:

I then sew the rows together to finish the quilt top. Here's how it turned out:

To give you a better idea of the size, here it is on the sofa in my office:

The top took about 35 hours of cutting, pressing and sewing to put together, and this is a very easy pattern that I've made many times. Once I've batted, backed and pinned it I'll hand quilt it, which will take another 40 to 50 hours. It's truly a labor of love, and also why I never sell my quilts. Paying myself minimum wage for labor plus the cost of the materials would mean I'd have to charge $700.00 for it just to break even. :)

Comments

nightsmusic said…

It's so pretty. He's got a gramma that loves him :)

June 12, 2020 at 12:13 PM

Love Means This

Invested in a couple of hand-dyed bundles from one of my favorite fabric artists. This one said "Make me into something for Valentine's Day." So I went for a quilted and embellished tote. I kept thinking about what love means to me as I worked on it. Here's the finished tote. Although I was tempted to embellish with beads and pins, I got sick and only felt well enough to do a little stitching every night. As I worked I thought about how often love seems disappointing to us, especially when it fails to live up to our expectations. But now that I've experienced love in many forms, I can say that it's made me a better person than I might have been without it. Love is a precious thing, and should be appreciated in all its forms. I am very grateful for the love of my guy, my child and my friends who have stuck with me all these years. That's you two, in case you're wondering. :) Also finally found something to do with a ve...

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Store Closing Haul

The mega Books-A-Million store over in Sanford is closing, and offered an extra 20% off on their current stock -- all sales final -- so I went over to do some shopping. Safely but sadly there was no one in the store but me the entire time I was there. The Holly Jackson novel is for Katherine, the Halloween board book is for Oliver, and the copy of Garden Spells is to keep on hand because I give that book to everyone. The rest of the books are for me. I love Anne Cleeves, and the Galbraith novel sounded interesting (the first couple weren't, but I'm willing to take another chance.) The Escape Room is by a new-to-me author, plus it was cheap. The GreenCraft mag is just a guilty pleasure. Hopefully the smaller BAM nearer to me won't close. I don't buy many books from brick-and-mortar stores these days, but that's really the last one within reasonable driving distance.

Valerean

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