Another product from a sewing day with Stacia and Deloise.

Thanks to my scrap collection I had almost enough of those tiny (one-inch finished) half-square triangles already made. I used leaders and enders to complete the 144 that I needed. Much to my surprise, as I was sorting through scraps to make the triangles I found so many that I’ve had to dedicate a shoebox just to triangles. I also had almost enough of the larger half-square triangles in my stash.

On an earlier project Stacia mentioned she had problems with a border of HSTs so I adjusted the pattern assembly so that I was sewing a portion of the border with each block. When I was ready to sandwich the project I remembered that using the small pins to baste was really hard on my fingers. Since I only had the small pins available I dug out a community quilt that was ready for quilting. I only quilted enough of it to get some larger pins for sandwiching.

I’m not happy with the quilting; it took me a long time to figure out a quilting pattern and then a long time getting into the rhythm. As my fingers have such a hard time tying thread ends and burying them I went with Stacia’s suggestion of backstitching each beginning and ending so I didn’t need to tie or bury. That worked well. As I quilted though I had some bunching around some of the HSTs; I maybe should have basted it better or done my quilting in a different order.

The binding also posed some problems. Again, because my fingers don’t work as they should, I did a machine-stitched binding. It seemed to be going well until I was almost at the end and I noticed I had missed the seam in one stretch. Because I was sewing with black thread on black it was very hard to pick the stitching out. Added to that was the fact that I was using Bottom Line thread so it was nearly invisible.

I’m glad to be moving on to the next project in the book.