Thinking

Thank you everyone, for the kind words about my stars quilt. I'm mulling over the next move. I've tentatively decided to put a pieced border in a folded ribbon design in that yellow space. Even using The Border Workbook by Janet Kime, this requires some heavy math, so I'll think about it tomorrow, as Scarlett O'Hara said.

In the meantime as a break, I made a Project Linus top to send to Quiltmaker for assembling. The directions call for paper piecing, and that's the logical way to make something that different quilters work on, but since I made the entire top myself, and I hate paper piecing, I pieced it the traditional way, and that worked fine. The whole project took about 3 hours. I had intended to add a narrow blue inner border, and that would have looked better, but I totally forgot until it was too late, and this is not a project to rip.



And another report on the Janome: for putting the blocks together, I chain pieced them, using the feature that allows you to run the machine with a push-button control instead of the foot pedal. (The speed is adjustable.) I'd been skeptical of this because I thought taking hands off the fabric to push the button would be a problem, but it worked beautifully, much faster and easier than reaching for the pedal all the time. When there are pins to remove, as there were in sewing the rows together, it was a bit trickier, but still worked well. The feature is supposed to be useful for free-motion stitching, and I'm looking forward to trying that.