I’ve finished the third block in the Folk Style Sampler. These are so much fun. I’ve been doing most of the work during my commute to/from work on the MetroLink . In between I’ve been appliquéing the First Saturday blocks from The Quilted Fox (I’ll post a picture of the First Saturday blocks next time).

Here’s the latest quilting to be completed 🙂 I must be ready to move on from meandering because I was a tiny bit bored with this one. The next quilt is ready to be loaded…I had to piece together the backing but it’s all set to go.

Oh, I did learn another lesson with this quilt though. I remember thinking when I pinned the backing on the machine that if I loaded the quilt sideways, I would get more quilting done with each roll forward. I evidentially forgot I planned to do this by the time I got to the quilt top because I loaded it right side up and, yes, the backing was too short!!! Had to take the whole thing off, sew another piece of the backing on and reload. While I might make that mistake again, it won’t be anytime soon!!!

I’ve finally done some things in the sewing world to blog about! In the first picture you’ll see I had “help” finishing my third quilt, another charity quilt. This is Casper, one of my two cats.

Here’s the third quilt ready to come off the longarm.

Here’s the fourth quilt, another charity quilt (do you see a theme?) with some quilting started in the borders.

Last, I received a thread catcher from a gift exchange at work and doesn’t it look cheerful? Much better than the plastic bags I taped up with blue painters tape. Of course the sewing desk is much less cluttered than it usually is since I cleaned it up for the picture 🙂

I am “webbing the top” ala Bonnie Hunter. Directions can be found on Bonnie’s website here. I’ve sewn the first three blocks of each row together and what you see here is the 4th block turned rightside down on top of the 3rd block. It gets a bit unwieldy but I’m having no trouble at all keeping the blocks in order and orientated the correct way. You have to fan fold the rows to get them stacked together to move to them to the sewing machine.

You might see where the thread (look at the green mat) is holding the rows together in this picture.

As you can see I’ve decided to go with the blue & red blocks as they are 🙂 I have a bunch of the 1 1/2 strips left and am thinking about sewing some court house step log cabin blocks as a leader/ender project next.

I have 10 more light/dark blue log cabin blocks to finish but wanted to see how the red/blue blocks looked as a border. I’m not sure I’m happy with them…… I only had a few red shirts so I used the large orange/red plaid and don’t like the look.  We’ll see what I decide to do shortly 🙂

I do like the light/dark blue blocks….a lot!!!