Halfway to Chickamauga

All the blocks are joined so now it's time - GULP - to face the mitered border!

Quilting along with the QAL

Here are the latest blocks the Threadhead's QAL:

I'm loving these colors!

On other fronts, I completed all thirty-six of the Chickamauga blocks and pinned them together by row.  Now to put a few hours in this morning joining the rows.  Not looking forward to the striped border because it has to be mitered.  Also not sure why I dread mitered borders so much because they've always turned out fine.  Everybody has a phobia, I guess.

UFO, you've gotta go!

Now that I have finished the Burgoyne Surrounded quilt top, I need to use the time before the start of the new Bonnie Hunter mystery productively, and how more productive could I be but to finish at least one UFO?  So I dug out my half-pieced version of the Chickamauga pattern (so appropriate because of where I live) and started piecing.  I have eight more blocks and then I can assemble it.  I find that the blocks take about 30 minutes each to sew, so I have probably half a day more and then about three days to complete it.  Here's a photo:

 I can't remember where I saw the pattern online (so I can't credit the following picture source, sorry) but I was taken with it enough to save this image of the quilt using the Marcus Civil War Journals fabric:

I see now with them side by side that I tweaked the pattern a little bit on the red blocks.

I had a collection of red-and-white and blue-and-white prints in my stash and that dark Civil War repro print lying at the left edge of the page which worked well for a border, so I dug out a beige print and some backgrounds from the stash closet and shopped for a stripe.  The one I found wasn't exactly what I had in mind but it was available and on sale, and coordinated well with the border.  I think it will work out very well.  Of course I'm making the darned thing bigger than the original so where it had 20 blocks I'm making 36.  As my mom says, I seem to always make quilts the size of football fields!

After this what?  It's not like I don't have a multitude of UFOs to choose from, we'll have to see.

Grandmother's Choice quilt block

This is the latest in the Grandmother's Choice block of the week.  It's another of those blocks which doesn't parse well into the 8" size.  Cutting at odd sizes is required = 1/16" anyone?  I think some of these might be better foundation pieced, as I have in the past.

Here's an EQ mock-up of the blocks so far with my proposed setting:

I'm liking how it's turning out and I love the green/purple/gold color scheme.

Burgoyne Surrounded - and defeated

Well, it turned out so enormously king-sized (101" square) that I could only display it folded in quarters for a photo because I ran out of floor space.  Here's my version of Burgoyne Surrounded.  I modified the design as given on Lyn Brown's blog in four ways - changed the border, substituted white squares in the center of the blocks, substituted white squares in the center of the sashing cornerstones and modified the sashing to have a nine patch block in the center  I'm very happy with how it turned out - and considering how large it is, happy that it's done!

Oh. . .good. . .grief

I didn't see my mistake when I was piecing the block, nor when I was pressing the block, nor when I was photographing the block.  It only became apparent that I had flubbed this when I was cropping the picture and concentrating on the bottom while aligning the cropping tool.  How in heaven's name can I overlook a screw-up like this?

It's amazing how blind you can be to your own errors.  Anyway, here's the latest "How Far Will You Go?" QAL block for the week.

And yes, I'm a idiot.

Dots are done!

Yay!  I just finished replacing the white square in the center of the last block of my Burgoyne Surrounded.  Now time to get back to assembling the quilt top.

I found a Hancock's of Paducah mailer in my inbox today and went to their site to look at a new 3 Sisters collection  called Double Chocolate.  Very pretty especially one of the quilt patterns created to go with the collection.  It's enough triangles to make you nuts, but it's gorgeous (image from Hancock's of Paducah site):

Have mercy!  I might consider it but Bonnie Hunter has a mystery coming up in November and I'm sure that one will keep me busy - a good reason to get my Burgoyne Surrounded quilt finished soon.  Back to sewing I go.