{pretty & happy}
Who wants another update on the most slowly made baby quilt in the history of the world? I knew you would :)
Well I finally finished piecing and quilting the whole thing--including ripping out the original quilting from the first six flowers I did and re-quilting them. Once my hand-quilting technique improved dramatically after reading Auntie Leila's advice on the subject* I couldn't just leave those middle flowers ugly could I?
The extra time it took to fix the ugly quilting also had the benefit of letting me procrastinate just a little bit longer on deciding how to bind this monster. I found tons of tutorials online about easy ways to bind these hexagon quilts but not a lot on traditional ways so I did what any bibliophile would do and bought a book on the subject--looking back I'm not sure why I didn't just start with the book but I suppose I've internalized the idea that the internet should be able to answer any and all questions I could ever come to think up. Apparently not. Internet, you have officially failed me.
While I wait for that to arrive I went ahead and made a yards worth of bias tape which I sincerely hope will be enough--I could have made an actual calculation about how much I would need if I knew what exactly I was going to do with it but, alas ;)
I think I'm going to attempt to bind each hexagon but not in a perfectly mitered way (which the lady at the quilt store did not think me capable of attempting--which of course had the opposite effect of making me want to do it simply to prove her wrong) but in a more rounded scalloped way and if that proves to be a disaster I'll just do a regular scalloped border. Of course I'm operating on internet directions and a prayer over here and don't actually have any idea what I'm doing so we'll see. Chris maintains that I should just add enough white hexagons to make it square and then bind a rectangle but clearly he doesn't see my vision--unrealistic though it may be........
Anyway, this is the back of the quilt. I quilted the edges of the flowers so that there would be these pretty flowers on the back--which also took a lot less time than say quilting each individual hexagon. I think it turned out pretty :)
{funny}
Henry (after being given the remains of a mostly empty honey jar): "There's nothin' better than lickin' honey mom."
Nothing indeed son :)
And who said babies don't have table manners? Apparently this is what happens in our house when you set the table and then proceed to give the baby a piece of bread to distract him while you finish making dinner. Clearly he couldn't be expected to eat his bread without proper utensils like some wild raised-in-a-barn-savage?
{real}
And this is what happens when you send a certain almost six year old on an errand to return something to the garage and he decides the laundry room would be just as convenient a dropping ground and besides it would save him those extra six steps to the garage! I'm still not sure how the plastic wrap made it into the washing machine or how I didn't notice it there when I started the load of towels but it surely was wound round that agitator tightly about a thousand time--or maybe a little less, it's hard to say.......
Sometimes you just have to laugh or you might find yourself having a laundry room breakdown instead :)
*I can't for the life of me find the link for the hand quilting tutorial and I'm starting to feel crazy so I'm officially giving up :)
And, as always, make sure to go check out more contentment over at Like Mother, Like Daughter!