Thirteen years ago, on St. Patrick's Day, my husband and I were hitched.  This weekend we celebrated with a long, couples staycation, an even loooooonger (two hour!) paddle on gorgeous Lake Jocasee (whew, I made it back!), finishing up with a joint Irish cooking class last night.  I learned to make an over-the-top-fabulous chocolate mint mousse and Brandon enjoyed corned beef, one of his favorite main dishes.

All around a very good weekend.  But as you know, dear quilter friend you, a surefire way to make any weekend even better is to do a little stitching.  That I did!

 

Except for our day at the lake, the weather has been too gloomy for photographs, but I took some anyway.  I actually have a thing for high contrast shots.  Anytime the setting sun falls across my work, I'm likely to grab that camera!  I thought I'd show you how I started the quilting on this postage stamp style quilt.  First I did straight lines in different directions to anchor it firmly against shifting, before quilting densely.



This morning I finished quilting the dense grid.  Since my patchwork squares are 2.5" finished, I didn't even have to mark lines.  I was able to run my Juki with its walking foot pretty darn straight just by eye to quilt lines across each square on each diagonal.  Such fun quilting without marking!  (I think that's one thing I really enjoy about free motion quilting.)  I used a green thread over the green checkerboard and a cream thread over the happy scrappy prints.  Keeping things interesting.



I had two large cuts of Denyse Schmidt vintage-inspired Dress Floral from her Shelburne Falls collection that seemed to fit the vibe of this classic quilt.  Combined with some Essex linen (pieced to the quilting cottons with 1/2" seams!) it's a sweet quilt back.



For the binding, a bit more Denyse Schmidt.  A stripe is always right as binding, isn't it?  Happens to be on sale here.



I always bind by first attaching the binding strip to the quilt top, wrapping it around the edge of the quilt and pinning, then attaching the binding on the back of the quilt with a zigzag stitch, stitched from the front. You can get all the details at my Zigzag Binding tutorial.   I think it's the easiest, most forgiving way to machine bind!

Now I've just got to run that zigzag stitch and this baby will be done.  It was a pleasure all the way through, probably heightened by the fact that I didn't need to make it and my fabrics practically volunteered.  Yay scraps!  If the weather cooperates for some photos, I'll be sharing the finish this week.

Hope you have a happy day!