WIP Weekend

Yesterday it rained.  All day.  Erik and I spent most of the day on the couch, watching all of the college teams that we wanted to win do just that.  Except for Iowa - I'll be paying the price spending the entire week in clinic with a professor who has an Iowa Hawkeye hand-painted porcelain crown in his mouth.  He'll be sorely disappointed.

While on said couch, I spent the day almost finishing the handquilting on a secret project that I never should have hand quilted.  I don't know what I was thinking.  You'll understand next week when I show you what I made.  Yeesh.

At about 10:00 pm last night, I remembered that I had intended to *make* my grandmother's birthday gift and never got around to it.  Since we had lunch over there today, I felt compelled to stay up until 2:30 am or so to start and finish these:

No pattern, and I just used scraps from the table runner I made her a while back.  I've always wanted to make those little folding pot grabbers and I think I have a pattern from some site saved somewhere, but when you have sewing mania late at night, you just go with it, right?  I think they turned out great and I had just enough Insul-Bright in my stash to make these.

While over there, today, I took a good look at the quilt I made her for her 80th birthday from my great-grandmother's fabric.  I decided I needed a better picture than the one I have, so I laid it out.  Apparently, taking quilt pictures with a toddler in the room is just like taking a quilt picture with cats in the room.  She got so excited about all the "squares" and I caught her right in the middle of her little dance.  Hilarious!

It's always hard to look at your work after several years of improving your skills and actually leaning the correct methods.  I told my Nanna that I would love to take it all apart and start over and she was horrified at the thought.  None of my corners match up and my hand-quilting stitches are ginormous and crooked.  Just look at the puckering in the borders that should have been quilted!  It was definitely a labor of love done in ignorance.  For the second quilt I ever made and the first I ever quilted, it's not too bad.  But it is very special.

As for the rest of the WIPs I have, I still have all evening to get some work done!