Lazy Labor Day

It may be September, but the temperatures and humidity have been as bad this weekend as they've been all summer. Needless to say, I've not been the most energetic creature on the planet. I've gotten a little bit of knitting done today, and I sewed in a label, but other than fixing food and eating I haven't done a whole lot today. So be it.

But, all things considered, this has been a productive week. Baby M is finally finished all the way to the label, although the label will need to be edited now that Baby M has made his appearance into the world two weeks early. That's easy enough to fix, and I'll get the quilt in the mail sometime this week.

Now that it's all finished, I've thought of a way I could have dealt differently with the top's refusal to lie flat. The moral of the story - don't have quilting lines cross each other. I could have quilted independent squares in each block, without crossing any seam lines, and the look of the quilt would have stayed essentially the same. I'm taking this into consideration as I'm planning the quilting in the next vintage top.

I also finished this small quilt, that I've always called Prison Bars. This one behaved a lot better, surprisingly, although the finished quilt doesn't want to lie quite flat. I suspect a bit of steam will help that happen, but for now it's going into the closet where finished quilts live. It has a label. It's official.

I'm not all together happy with the maroon binding, but this was a case of necessity dictating choices. Ideally I would have bound it with the same navy I used in the body of the quilt. But I finished this top 20 years ago, and that fabric is long gone. Since navy is one of those colors that is notoriously difficult to match, I opted to use the same fabric I used for the backing. There are small bits of that color in the print, so it's not a completely random choice. But I think it calls attention to itself a bit too much.

I do like the quilt, and I'm thinking that I may have to do another one some day. I think it was the first quilt I made where you start with a large square of fabric, cut it into segments, insert a second fabric, then recut in a different direction and square up the resulting block. Rotary cutters were a relatively new invention, and this was an early design, created by Georgia Bonesteel, that took full advantage of its capability. I think it holds up to the test of time, and I'd like to see what would happen with a feature fabric and a set of strips in coordinating solids.

The other finish for this week was a set of place mats that are to be a wedding gift. The pattern was one I bought on a trip to Iowa last fall. It uses four fat quarters. Pieces are cut and shuffled, and the result is four place mats with the fabrics in different places. I worked from yardage, so did a double set, two of each color placement. I suspect there will also be napkins before the day of the wedding, but they're just a matter of cutting the fabric and making hems.

I also spent a little time this week trying to come up with a plan for the next baby quilt, which ideally will be done by the end of the month. I bought fabrics a year ago, but coming up with a plan for using them proved a bit of a challenge. I made a couple of test blocks and wasn't at all happy with them. But now I think I have a workable idea, so before the week is over I'll start working at putting that together.

Now I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea that I have Christmas gifts that have to be finished by the end of the month. I think I need to knit faster. No - that just makes me crazy and leads to mistakes and frustration. The good news is I've discovered the newest Doctor Who series. 116 episodes suitable for binge watching! One stitch at a time.