Circa 2016

I am a huge fan of Temecula Quilt Company's Sew-a-Longs and have made several of them. This is one of my favorites, Circa 2016, on the design wall more than a year ago. The pattern is still available  here:

The outer border stripe is wider on the top border, I just didn't cut it down, it was the last strip of border stripe I had left--once the quilt is finished all four borders will be trimmed to the same size.

The other day I finally started quilting this--it has been basted and waiting for me to get to it for about a year:

 It took about two and a half hours to stitch in the ditch along every construction seam. It was easy work using my favorite tool, the Line Tamer Ruler or "template". It allows me to quilt very straight lines quickly with the Bernina Q20 sit down longarm machine--it has no feed dogs so no walking foot would work.

The back shows the simple lines currently quilted. I will quilt in free motion curvy designs in each square created by the stitch-in-the-ditch grid. One advantage to doing all the stitch-in-the-ditch first is, all the pins are being removed as I quilt--now there are no pins to get in the way as I do the free motion designs:

The biggest challenge will be that 3.5" finished size border. I really want to quilt a curvy, flowing large feather design so am currently drawing that on paper a lot to establish "muscle memory". I am also taking a Free Motion Quilting class with my friend Jenny Lyon, Quiltskipper, in Houston, that will help too. When I come home I'll draw some 3.5" wide lines on practice fabric and work on this design until I am comfortable going to the real quilt or just get tired of practicing and decide to jump in! 

With any luck, this one will be done before the year is over and the label I printed last year will still be correct.

Let's quilt,

Barbara