OMG! I Met My Goals for August, Early! What Should I Do With Myself?

 Oh my gosh, you guys -- this is a rare surprise.  There are still 7 whole days left in the month of August, and I just realized that I have finished all of the quilting goals I'd set for this month.  Finished them EARLY.  I know, right?!  Who IS this imposter, and what has she done with the REAL Rebecca Grace?!

And it's not like I was wimpy with those goals, either.  Let's recap:

August Quilting Goals:

1. ✅ Finish cutting out the next four blocks for MMBB & move them off the cutting table.
2. ✅ Trim excess batting and backing from Spirit Song quilt
3. ✅ Make the binding for Spirit Song
4. ✅ Digitize & machine embroider a label for Spirit Song; appliqué to back of quilt
5. ✅ Machine stitch binding to the front of Spirit Song
6. ✅ Hand stitch binding to the back of Spirit Song.  Launder & photograph.
7. ✅ Decide what's getting quilted next and load it onto the long arm frame
8. ✅ Piece one or more of those MMBB blocks that are printed up, cut out, and ready to sew
9. ✅ Launch & promote Weekly Long Arm Linky party, beginning August 4th

My Spirit Song quilt, renamed Sermon Scribbles, is completely finished.  You can read more about that one here:

I finished all four of the blocks for my version of the Moda Modern Quilt Blocks that were printed up and ready to start at the beginning of the month.  Twelve blocks down, 36 more to go on that one.  To see more about that project, click here:

And my fourth Long Arm Learning link up published automatically an hour ago, just as scheduled.  If you're looking for today's LAL linky party, click here!  I've been learning so much from what other machine quilters are sharing in that space.

I also managed to finish all of the items on last week's To-Do list.

Last Week's To-Do List:

• ✅ Piece backing for tumbler outreach top pictured above (next in line for quilting!)
• ✅ Load tumbler quilt on frame
• ✅ Select pantograph and thread
• ✅ Quilt tumbler quilt

I'm not sure the pantograph I chose (Wild at Heart) was necessarily beginner friendly, but it was one that I owned, the scale was right, and it came out better than expected.  Win!  This quilt will be donated to a pediatric patient in one of our local hospitals, through the Charlotte Quilters Guild.

So, I find myself with a whole freebie week at the end of August, with everything crossed off my quilty To-Do lists early!  What should I do with it?  

I think my goal for this week should involve a project that I've been neglecting, something like this tumbler top that languished for over a year in my Purgatory closet...  This week, my goals are going to be about anti-procrastination.

This Week's Tuesday's To-Do List:

• Start piecing my Modern Baby Clam Shell Quilt (for the baby who was born in 2018, who is about to become a big sister this October!)

That's it, just the one thing.  It's enough.  It's just a 40" x 40" baby quilt, and all of the pieces are cut out, but I stalled out because I was unsure of how I wanted to construct them.  I'm still unsure, except that I know I want to actually piece them rather than doing an appliqué method.  So I need to get these out again and figure out where to start -- do I build out from the center circles, or do I start at the top and work my way down.  And I need to decide whether a 40" x 40" quilt is even big enough to be useful to a 2-year-old or if I should enlarge it somehow...  Ugh.  Dread.  See?  This was supposed to be a "quick and easy" baby gift two years ago.  I want it off my list of works in progress projects left abandoned!  One goal is enough for this week!

I'm linking up today's post with the end-of-August One Monthly Goal link up at Elm Street Quilts, and with To-Do on Tuesday at Home Sewn By Us.  

LAL#3: The One Where Rebecca Finally Finishes a Quilt, but Doesn't Love It Anymore

 Happy Tuesday, friends!  Welcome to another Long Arm Learning linky party!  I actually have a finished (long arm quilted) quilt to share with you today, my FIRST finished quilt of 2020 -- and yes, I do know how pathetic that is to be finishing my first quilt of the year in mid-August.  My Sermon Scribbles quilt is FINISHED, as in quilted, labeled, bound, washed, and photographed!  

I started piecing this in November of last year, and loaded it on my frame for quilting in April, just as this crazy pandemic lockdown was settling in.  From beginning to end, this silly quilt has taken 9 months to complete.  Like the gestation of a child, for crying out loud.

We were taking these photos just past 6 o'clock, with the sun sinking in the sky, and the light was kind of electrifying -- the quilt doesn't look quite so fluorescent in real life!  Here's a shot of the same quilt indoors, spread across the bottom of my bed with morning light flooding in from the window:

See?  Not nearly as bright as it looked outdoors.  By the way, I'm disappointed by the extent to which my custom quilting was minimized by the shrinkage and crinkling that happened in the first washing.  A single layer of Quilter's Dream Cotton Select batting was not enough to do justice to 5 months' worth of custom quilting.  For your reference, here's what this quilt looked like prior to washing, fresh off the frame:

And now I can understand more clearly why quilters use a batting with more loft, or even a double layered batting, for heavy custom and heirloom quilting.  Live and learn!  This quilt lost approximately 8% of its length and width from heavy quilting takeup and from shrinking in the wash.  On the positive side, any wobbles or wiggles in my quilting that I wasn't happy with certainly aren't going to be noticed now.  And I still got the benefit of practicing all of those different quilting motifs, even if you can't really see them in the finished quilt.  This would have been an excellent candidate for an edge to edge pantograph quilting design, IF my objective in making it hadn't been furthering my free motion quilting practice.

The truly weird thing is that I don't know what to do with this one, now that it's quilted.  The colors are all wrong for it to live anywhere in my house -- it doesn't go with any of our bedrooms and, at 54" x 70", it's not bed sized anyway.  It's all wrong for my traditionally decorated living room and family room.  It wasn't meant as a gift for anyone and it's too big to be a baby quilt for a shower gift.  So this is my first Completely Useless Quilt Going Straight Into Storage!

54" x 70" Sermon Scribbles

Nothing But the FAQs, Ma'am:

Ah, well -- here are the stats we quilters always want to know about a quilt:

Name: Spirit Song Sermon Scribbles

Size: 54" x 70" Throw

Pattern: Traditional 8" Airplane blocks, no pattern used

Fabrics: Mostly from stash, with a Kaffe Fassett border print

Batting: Quilter's Dream Cotton Select

Thread: Superior MonoPoly for SID; everything else is Superior So Fine #50 in the needle with Bottom Line in the bobbin

It took me three days to bind it, and yes, I'm happy with how my binding came out.

Here's what the back of the quilt looks like, post-washing:

If I Had This Quilt to Do Over?

What would I do differently, if I were to make this same quilt again?

• I would rotary cut my HSTs instead of using the AccuQuilt GO! HST triangle dies
• I would quilt this with a much simpler design since the heavy piecing and dizzying array of prints makes it hard to see the quilting anyway.  This would be a great candidate for an edge to edge (E2E) pantograph design
• I would have used a single thread color for the whole thing, something like a pastel pink or yellow Glide, to reduce the hassle of thread color changes -- and so the quilting would show up better when all is said and done
• I would have used either an 80/20 blend batting or a wool batting, something with minimal shrinkage and more loft to show off the quilting design better
• I would have made sure all of the fabrics in the quilt had been prewashed and preshrunk prior to using them in the quilt, because the use of so many unwashed precuts surely factored into the amount of shrinkage and puckering that happened with this quilt as well.  Again, not a bad thing necessarily -- I like the crinkly shrinkage with certain quilts, but it's working against my quilting in this particular quilt
• I would have done the more elaborate quilting designs in the background fabrics, where they would show up better, rather than on the busy pink and orange print fabrics, where they disappear

But I won't be making this quilt again, because I've fallen a bit out of love with it, now that it's done.  What I can say is that I'm very glad I decided to make a quilt top out of fun, cheerful fabrics for the sole purpose of practicing quilting on it.  It's been far more fun than endless practicing on muslin, and I've learned a lot with it!

And Now, Tuesday's To-Do List:

Last Week's To-Do List:

• Finish that 15" orange block with the flying geese for Anders' sampler quilt
• Trim the edges of my Sermon Scribbles quilt
• Applique my label to the back of Sermon Scribbles
• Make binding for Sermon Scribbles, machine stitch to front of quilt & hand stitch to the backing
• Wash Sermon Scribbles and take that quilt out for a photo shoot!
• Piece backing for tumbler outreach top (next in line for quilting!)

Wow -- I actually did pretty good with my list last week, didn't I?!

This Week's To-Do List:

• Piece backing for tumbler outreach top pictured above (next in line for quilting!)
• Load tumbler quilt on frame
• Select pantograph and thread (Do you have suggestions for a thread color and/or a good beginner-friendly pantograph design for this quilt?  If so, please comment away!)
• Quilt tumbler quilt

I'm linking this post up with the To Do on Tuesday linky party over at  Home Sewn By Us.  I'm also linking up with the following "finish!" parties, since I finally have a finish to share:

·       Whoop Whoop Fridays at Confessions of a Fabric Addict

·       Peacock Party at Wendy’s Quilts and More

·       Finished Or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

·       Off the Wall Friday at Nina Marie Sayre

·       TGIFF Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday, rotates, schedule found here: http://tgiffriday.blogspot.ca/p/hosting-tgiff.html

But I'm also inviting YOU to link up, right here and right now, with your latest machine quilting post for Long Arm Learning!  This linky will be open until midnight on Friday, with a new linky opening up every Tuesday morning.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter