January sewing

I've been up in the sewing room working on the Fiery Starr border.  Feathers seem to complement the inner feathers the best so I marked the quilt lightly with a spine curve and then started in sewing freehand feathers.  (Somewhere it was suggested to mark a quilt I with a sliver of soap...  Memo to myself.  You can't hold a sliver of soap in your mouth like you can a pencil when moving a quilt... Yuck.)

As usual it takes a bit of time to get into a rhythm of sewing feathers.

"Can I really do this or am I just making a mess?"

After a few false starts I sewed one border with half of a feather.  And didn't like it... 

Sigh.  Well my theory with machine quilting is the more sweeps around the less the glitches show so I added another line of stitching within the feathers...  Better!  This is how it is going to go!  I'll keep you updated.

And while I'm downstairs in the warmth I have been buttonhole appliqueing.

Mrs. Furui has been asking me to think up a quilt for her volunteer group at the hospital to make.  She wants to put an autumn quilt up on the hospital wall.  Now I don't know these ladies at all... but Mrs. Furui would not let up.  She's working on a  summer quilt for the hospital wall so that's why I got the assignment of the autumn quilt.

I've seen dual image quilts before... but some seemed too complicated and as I say, I don't really know what these ladies can do...  Simple is best.  So from an Internet picture I made my own simple leaf pattern and have been experimenting.  I think the original pattern was in Quiltmakers magazine but I don't have the pattern itself.  This is pretty easy...  I'll head over to Mrs. Furui's and see what she thinks.