10 Years!

I find it pretty hard to believe, but I've been blogging for 10 years! It's my ten year blogiversary! 

What did I blog about ten years ago?

I blogged about the quilt I made for my parent's 50th anniversary. It was them having their 60th anniversary that made me realize I've been blogging 10 years. 

Their anniversary quilt was the first quilt I designed myself. I still think it's a cool idea, but I'm happy to say my quilting skills have improved aver the last ten years! Practice makes perfect, and my quilts are far from perfect, so I must be still practicing.

Speaking of practicing, that's exactly what I've been doing this week. I started quilting on the bargello quilt. I knew I wanted to quilt the center in a manner that focused on the waves in the bargello design, and my first thought was to quilt it on my Bernina with a walking foot. I could have done that, and it would have looked just the same as what I actually decided to do. 

I have some quilting rulers that I had yet to use with my Tin Lizzie. I knew there was a learning curve to using rulers for quilting, and I decided that quilting diagonally across almost 2,000 various sized rectangles would be great practice on how to manage a ruler, and how to line it up 1/4" away from where I wanted to be. 

I have several quilting rulers in various sizes, but I decided starting with these might be easiest because they have handles. The handles make them quite easy to hold in place. If you are wondering where I got these, I purchased them here.

I just hit the halfway point on quilting the center. I'm still debating what I'll quilt in the border. 

I haven't done a whole lot of sewing besides quilting on the bargello. I have been trying to deal with all the batting and backing scraps left over from pin-basting six quilts last week. If the batting scrap is big enough, I'm cutting out burp rag shapes from it. If it's too narrow for that, I'm cutting 2.5" strips, because I'd like to make a few jelly roll rugs. I won't be making the rugs in the near future, but it takes a lot of batting strips to make them, and I'd like to have enough ready to make a couple rugs before I start.