Back Stitching

I'm finally back in my sewing room, stitching away. 

I have a jelly roll, that I wanted to turn into a quilt.  I'd seen some ideas on Pinterest, but, I only liked parts of the quilts.  So.... graph paper to the rescue, once again.

pattern drawn

Well, I really wanted to use Betty Sue, my purple featherweight, to sew all these strips.  Problem was, Betty Sue has been making thread nests since late last summer.  With all the work on the Peter Pan quilt, I hadn't had time to really work on Betty Sue, to figure out what was wrong.  I finally found part of the problem after taking the bottom plate off and working the hand wheel over and over.  A tiny end of thread finally showed up from behind the bobbin case.  After carefully unwinding it, it was over a foot long.  After a few more adjustments, Betty Sue was back to stitching .

Betty Sue, stitching nicely now

First, I stitched 27 strips together.

sorry, bad picture

Then I cut and stitched the flying geese.  I made bonus HST's with the corners. 

flying geese and bonus HST's

I finished the quilt top yesterday afternoon. I wanted to show the quilt top off at my little quilt guild last night.  (sorry, I didn't get a picture)

This is where I am now.

spray basting backing and batting

I'm letting this layer dry before I spray baste the top.  I'll quilt this one myself, using Lorna's wavy line quilting.  My Janome is great for this part.  Hopefully I'll have a completed quilt to show you soon. 

I forgot to take pictures of the other sewing I did yesterday afternoon.  I'll save it for another post.  Lets just say that I'm not wasting the extra strips from the jelly roll. 

Hope you are getting lots of stitching done, too.