This Blog Will Bore You If You Do Not Sew.

I am making a quilt and am quite excited about it. It is a folk art style pattern, with appliqued wreaths of red flowers and greenery on four cream-print background squares. I'll post a picture one of these days. The applique was a pain in the neck. There were 208 pattern pieces to be traced onto fusible web, then fused onto the fabric, then cut out. (The pattern would have had me cutting out the pieces twice, once on the paper tracings and once on the fabric, which is ridiculous. I stuck the paper to the fabric and then cut the pieces out, just once.) The pattern was also wrong. As a beginner, I hesitate to say that, but it is true. It is impossible for the completed flower wreath to fit onto the background square in the prescribed manner. So I had to adjust the pattern. This was a little bit tricky, but with the help of my engineer husband, a ruler, and a compass (of the geometric variety, not the Boy Scout variety), I pulled it off. That'll teach me to use a free pattern from the Internet. I am now stitching the appliqued pieces into place. I started to machine stitch them using a simple zigzag stitch, but found that there are so many starts and stops on this particular piece that it was impractical to machine stitch it. So I'm hand-stitching it using a blanket stitch. It is slow going, but I enjoy sewing by hand, so it's okay. I will be glad when this step is done, because the next step is my favorite part of quilting - piecing the quilt top together. This is very satisfying. It's fast, relatively easy, and you get a sneak preview of what the finished quilt will look like. I hope to be able to do that part this coming weekend. We'll see.