20th Quilt Finish of the Year

Baby Marvel is a finish! It's my 20th quilt finish of the year. I've finished other projects, like the table runner, which I didn't count as a quilt finish, even though it's quilted. I pretty much only count baby sized quilts and up as quilt finishes. 

 I'm happy to have this one finished! I've got the twin sized Star Wars quilt that needs to mailed with this one quilted, I will bind it this weekend, and hopefully mail them both on Monday. 

As with most of my baby quilts, it's wider than WOF, so I needed to make the backing a bit wider. My favorite way to do that is by clearing out some orphan blocks.

I had five blocks leftover from my nephew's wedding quilt, and those five were just about the perfect size to increase the backing!

I've only got a few seams left to have the center of the night fairy quilt assembled. I'm hoping to finish that quilt top in the next couple days, so I can put another up on the design wall. I still need to cut an inner border for it though. 

My mystery quilt progress is slow and steady. Considering I started a week late, and I've been working on multiple other projects, I think I'm doing OK. I've got all of clue 1 sewn, and most of it pressed. That's good, because I looked at clue 3 this morning, and I need clue 1 finished to do clue 3. On clue two I'm about half done. I think I've got enough pieces cut to finish. Since I'm trying to die cut the mystery quilt, and I'm using men's shirts for fabric, I'm actually just cutting a few pieces at a time, and sewing them up then seeing if I need more. This is so NOT my normal way of working! If I were rotary cutting, I wouldn't think twice about just cutting a bunch of strips, knowing if I cut too many, they could just go into my scrap user system. I try not to have a bunch of extra die cuts though, I tried that once and I still haven't done much with them. Since men's shirts are such weird shapes when you cut them apart, I don't always end up with as many pieces as the die can cut, sometimes a couple pieces are a bit short because the fabric wasn't squared off. No worries though, I'm just tossing the wonky bits into the crumb bucket. I saw on clue 3 we need to cut some extra squares from neutrals. Since my neutral is a solid, I may just rotary cut those, which won't take long at all. Die cutting all the triangles has saved me a bunch of time though! 

I need to rotary cut some of the pieces for another quilt too, which needs to be done by March. Actually, after the Star Wars quilt is finished, both my next deadline quilts are due in March. I'm still debating which pattern to use for the March baby quilt, but the twin sized I Spy for my youngest granddaughter I have all figured out. I've got all the novelty fabrics cut for it, I just need to cut the fabrics for the Attic Windows bit. I'm totally cheating on the Attic Window's part. I can't imagine doing 80 mitered corners for one quilt, so I'm doing the cheater method that just uses an HST in the corner. 

I've got so many projects going on right now, I can't really even say which is my leader/ender project and which is my main project. Basically, when I'm piecing, I just always make sure there's something under the needle. I have several quilts cut out, and I just kind of grab whichever pieces are closest to whichever machine I'm at. Since I'm assembling quilts and piecing all at once, it's kind of a free for all. Add to that I've got two machines set up for piecing right now, and it really adds to the chaos. Thankfully, I'm pretty good at working on multiple things at once, and rare is the time I sew the wrong things together. My Janome is always either set up for quilting or binding, I've never done anything else with it, nor do I plan on using it for anything else. I could sew all kinds of things on it, but with three machines set up all the time, I don't have to, and I prefer it that way. By FMQ one hour a day, it keeps my UFO's moving through the queue, without a big commitment to quilting UFO's. If I have deadline quilts, those move to the head of the quilting queue, but other than that, I just try to keep a couple UFO's basted and ready to go so I always have a FMQ project to work on that first hour of sewing.