I'm still feeling too distracted to work on any quilt projects that require major concentration, but I have managed to add some finishing details to a couple of items.
Our recent weather has not been conducive to quilty glamour shots, so I resorted to indoor photography.
Harmony Flannel Quilt
Pattern: Harmony by Carried Away Quilting
Finished size: 70" x 70"
Quilting by Diane Knott of Butterfly Threads Quilting.
Note to self: avoid black binding (even if machine-stitched) on all future quilts!
The quilt is already winging its way to my oldest son, who lives in Denver. Their spring weather is still a ways off, so I think he'll get some good use out of it. As much as I disliked working with the flannel fabrics, the quilt turned out very snuggly - and it's heavy!
Fabric: New Orleans 1850 by Jean Ann Wright for New Castle Fabrics
Pattern: Pyramid by Monique Dillard
Finished size: 54" x 68"
I love that purple paisley fabric!
And the border print is really amazing, too!
I decided "New Orleans 1850/Pyramid" wasn't a particularly good quilt name, so I labeled the quilt as "Beautiful Crescent". New Orleans is known as the Crescent City because the original city was founded at a sharp turn - or crescent - in the Mississippi River.
The fabrics are from a collection by Lella Boutique called Farmer's Daughter. They play together so nicely for these binding kits, I think I'll have to make a couple more and use up more of the fabrics!
Sherri McConnell (A Quilting Life) asked Vanessa if she could make the binding kit just a little bit bigger, which resulted in a taller version. Sherri calls her version a Simple Sewing Kit, and she put together a video tutorial demonstrating how she made it.
Now that I've made two of these, I think I can quickly stitch up a few more and keep them on hand as gifts.
If you're still reading - thank you!
You may have heard that New Orleans was hit by tornadoes on Tuesday night.
Thankfully, the primary storm was not particularly organized as it passed near us - we just had lots of wind and some rain. As the storm moved east, it jumped across the Mississippi and now more organized, did plenty of damage to a downriver suburb called Arabi. As many as 150 homes and businesses sustained damage. With the storm coming at night, it's amazing there weren't more fatalities, but only one death has been reported.
Thank goodness weather forecasting has gotten better at
predicting severe weather, so communities can at least be aware of
what's brewing. Our cell phones blasted out the tornado warning, and
since the power didn't go out, we were able to tune to local TV stations
for real-time mapping of the tornado!
As always, folks in south Louisiana are resilient and the community is already pitching in to help clean up and take care of those affected by the storm.
