A few more bowties under my belt

These are adorable, but if I make a king size quilt edge to edge with blocks, I need 576 of them.  Really?  Can I make that many of these little things?  The thought is boggling. 

Maybe a wide border.  Or sashing.  Sashing's nice.  Or alternate plain blocks.  Or.,....

Nope.  Wouldn't be the same.  Just keep on cranking out bows.  After all, you only have 500 or so to go.......

Finished the fourth binding, and musing on the material requirements of quilting

I just finished putting in the final stitches on the label of the fourth quilt.  It boggles the mind how much sewing goes into a large bed quilt.  On binding alone, in the four I finished there was just shy of 1600 inches of blind hemming!  Astounding. 

And the fabric!  There is about 7 1/2 yard on each backing of these big quilts including margins, and anywhere upwards from 9 yards in a quilt top.  The seams eat up a huge amount, as I discovered when I totaled what went into one of them.  For example, the 100 inch square log cabin quilt I just finished had 64 10" square blocks, and two borders, the first 2" and the second 8".  Each 10" block is 100 square inches but requires 162.5 square inches of fabric.  That's 10,400 square inches for the blocks, 825 square inches for the first border and 3,400 square inches for the outer  border, for a total of 14,625 square inches of fabric.  Using an average usable width of 42" for a bolt of quilting cotton, that's over 9 1/2 yards of fabric and these were simple blocks without a lot of seams.

No wonder quilting is getting so expensive!

Third binding done

Finished another one.  This is a Carrie Nelson design called "Sweet Escape".  It's just Jacob's Ladder blocks recolored and repositioned so as to make vertical chains of squares.  Cute.  I'm happy with it, and I'm happy that another binding is done!

Another binding done

This is the quilt I couldn't bear to call the actual name of the block - Devil's Claw!  It ended up being named Star Flower.

And yes, Molly has moved since yesterday.  She just ended up sleeping in the same spot as her previous after-dinner nap. 

One binding down, three to go

Doesn't match the pillows and bed skirt.  Doesn't match the drapes.  But here is the coffee quilt I made for my husband, bound, labeled and done.

And there's Miss Shiny Eyes, ready for her after dinner nap.

Quiltmaker magazine mystery quilt

Here's a photo of the Quiltmaker mystery quilt.  I added the peach border and changed out the star centers from the fabric used on the points to that of the border.  It's OK, but I wouldn't have set out to make it.

Hand sewing. Boooooring.

Working on hand sewing bindings this weekend.  My fingers hurt.  I'm tired of hunching over the desk squinting at the striped binding. 
I'm whining.  I know.......

On other fronts, I completed the Quiltmaker mystery quilt - sorry, no picture, post one later.  It turned out it wasn't a pattern I would have chosen to make, but oh well, it will be a good gift for someone.  If I had known the color placement, I would have chosen differently.  One danger of mystery quilts.

The binding has to take first place because I let it stack up since the first of the year (blush) except for my niece's quilt.  Now I have to get all this completed before my nephew's gift quilt comes back from the longarm quilter.  After all those gift quilts at Christmas I was totally burned out on hand sewing bindings so now I have four (four!) to finish.  Sigh

Here's a non-whining reason for this post, the center of a little Christmas quilt I need to finish: