Quilting with Bonnie

No, not Bonnie Hunter!  My friend Bonnie spent the past 3 days at my house and we sewed until we were collapsing in giggles!  We always have so much fun when we're together!

Our quilting adventure didn't go exactly as planned though.  We were going to use a jelly roll of Kansas Troubles that I had, along with some coordinating fabric that Bonnie chose, to make a Tesselating Star quilt. However, I realized the night before Bonnie got here that I wouldn't be able to get all the cuts out of a jelly roll strip if I stuck to the original pattern.  Needless to say, I should have checked out the instructions at Sew Jewelry before I began anything.

At any rate, I thought that we would simply make the strips 1/2" shorter than what the pattern called for and end up with a slightly smaller star block.  When Bonnie arrived, we set to work and cut all the pieces we'd need for 30 blocks for the throw quilt we want to make. And that's the second mistake we made--should have made one block before doing all the cutting! When we sewed the strips together and set up the block, I realized that changing the length of the strips without changing the width meant that the 4 sections of the star wouldn't fit together. Aaargh!

So, we moved on to Plan B.  We took the 4 sections of the star and rearranged them to come up with a rectangular block that we could work with. We sewed all 30 blocks and retired for the evening with a glass of wine before the fireplace. On Day 3, we laid out the blocks on the floor and decided that we'd put a spacer strip (or sashing) between each row of blocks like this:

We both liked how that was coming along so that will be the center of the quilt.  I'm thinking of putting on a narrow 1st border in a dark color--maybe black--to contain the center and then a pieced border using the half square triangles I salvaged from the scraps we cut off as we were piercing the "stars." I've become addicted to converting these little triangles into additions in the border of my quilts or to be used in another way--a doll quilt maybe.

In addition to working on the quilt, we went for a walk on a cold winter day, saw "The Revenant" at the movies (Don't ask me why this film was nominated for so many awards!  We all agreed that it was a colossal waste of time.) and fixed several yummy meals and consumed a couple bottles of wine.  All in all, a wonderful 3 days!

Now, back to normal. I have people coming over tonight for "Handwork Group" and have to do a bit of housework and preparing for that.