Planning for February

 New fabrics and two new quilts are in the plans for February.  These red, white and blues were impulse buys yesterday when shopping for pillow inserts for the grandkids reading pillows.

Remember my bright idea to make a small gingham quilts for my rocking chair on the front porch?  Well I didn't get one made in January so why not make two in February.  I couldn't resist the polka dots and cherry fabric.  The gal at the store was looking at me kinda funny when I pulled the bolts of fabric down and walked about 20 feet away to look at them from afar.  I needed to make sure there was going to be enough contrast to make a gingham quilt.  It's not as much contrast as I wanted but it's the best I could do with the options at Hobby Lobby.  No reason to buy quilt shop fabrics for a quilt that will be seeing all kinds of weather.

The blue fabrics have great contrast.

The plan is to cut and piece both of these quilts at the same time.  It'll be a nice quick project to give me a break from quilting the current UFO.

The Amour de Cerise quilt has been giving me a little trouble.  Let's hope this isn't a sign of things to come.  The problem is more me than it is the quilt.  Finding the right quilting design is taking far longer than I thought.  The one below requires more measuring and marking than I would like so I decided to try something else.

My brain just couldn't get away from the complex designs.  Again this is too much marking and would be time consuming.

Crosshatching is one of my favorite ways to quilt a quilt so let's go with that.  It's fairly easy to mark a quilt for the lines.  However one inch crosshatching is too much and doesn't leave room for imperfections.

I opted to go with two inch crosshatching.  The imperfections are harder to spot.  The arrow below shows the last line made on this quilt top.  The squares on a couple rows will actually be rectangles. It will blend right in and not be noticeable when the quilt is finished.  The quilting in the quilt blocks will be free motion so there's no need to mark anything.  Now to finally get this girl on the quilt frame.

Until next time...

I hope you find time to stitch up something sweet!