Another Saturday Sewing

BJ came and sewed although her machine was playing up a bit, maybe needs a checkup. We moan about the regular maintenance, so expensive even for a simple mechanical machine these days they charge around $80, more even for the electronic machines.
BJ was tying out a top from her early days of piecing. It's for a young middle schooler who recently lost his Dad and she sent a pic from her phone but it didn't come through clearly enough. Her other project was for a friend an act of kindness from BJ's soft heart, making a curtain to hang in front of a closet from which the doors have been removed. As quilters we really would rather be quilting!
So, mea culpa, no pics of BJ's work- you really need to jog my mind about that at the time, BJ!

The Craftsy BOM for June has been out two weeks and today those blocks went together fast.

 These are bright, happy combinations that will add some cheer to this all batik quilt. In fact they were so fast there was time to make a couple more using up some red, black and white batik scraps in HST's - but the strips weren't wide enough to make 4.5" squares so BJ showed me the Debbie Caffrey method.

Sew the strips together down each long side,

 then using this Easy Angle ruler cut the HST's, just flipping the ruler over after each cut. 

Open and press to the dark side and this is the result, I got 10 nice HST's from strips too narrow to get that size any other way. Pretty slick though it's necessary to be a little careful with additional piecing because there are two bias sides now.

This is one of the blocks made from them and there's another that I am still working on.

Interesting the color difference between photographing in daylight and under artificial light. I have some "Daylight " bulbs that need to go into the overhead fixture in my studio, it might be quite an improvement.

There is very little waste with this method, here are four smaller HST's made from the end pieces, those will wait for another day.

The first job this morning was to piece the backing for the Mystery quilt that got it's borders yesterday. Now most of this line of fabrics is gone, usually my goal with any project- that way the stock can be  rotated, LOL! Recently months have seen some more discipline in my work; when each top is complete my goal is to prepare the backing, that way when there's an opportunity to get a quilt on the longarm there is no excuse and no delay!

Finally, last night saw the finished binding on my summer quilt and it's now on our bed!

Woohoo!