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Timeless Stitches: New Beginnings, 19 Jan 2022


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Timeless Stitches
Published in The Baldwin City Community  News
January 19, 2022
 


--Sharon Vesecky

January--the time for resolutions and new beginnings! Personally I skip the resolutions. They never last very long anyway. But as a quilter, I'm all about new beginnings. I love to start new quilting projects, imagine what the finished quilt will look like and try different fabrics together to see how they interact. I've tried several things to reduce my stack of unfinished projects--can't start a new one until I finished two, etc. Just can't seem to stick to it. New fabric comes into the shop and I just have to make a sample for the shop. 

This week I found a piece of fabric that I had never seen before in a box of fabric that had been given to me. I had seen a pattern in a recent quilt magazine that required only two companion fabrics and I set out on a mission! I found two other fabrics that worked well with the first one and started cutting pieces. It goes together quickly and I will have the top finished this weekend. But then there is the quilting and binding.

Binding is my least favorite part of making a quilt. I have several quilts that would be finished if the binding were done. Between Christmas and New Year's I founded them up and machine sewed the binding to the quilt, folded them and made a neat stack of them. I'll finish the handwork as I watch TV or am riding in the car. (Oh, I feel so organized!)

Next I tackled the scraps from the Christmas quilts I have made through the years. I started cutting pieces from the fabrics that were smaller than about a quarter of a yard. The first project I had in mind was an eight-pointed star quilt for which I was double checking the instructions. As I cut pieces for that quilt, I found fabric pieces that wouldn't work in it, but they would work in one of five other scrap projects I had started or in potholders. Then there were pieces left over from that. I sorted the leftovers by size and trimmed away scrappy sections that were too small to use for anything, labeled several zip loc bags with the widths of the pieces and stored them all nice and tidy. Next I folded the larger pieces, sorted them by color and placed them in a storage container. (Boy, did I feel like I had accomplished something!) After a final check to see if there are more scraps that can be repurposed, I'll be ready to move on to another group of fabrics. Batiks, watch out! You are next!

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About Quilters' Paradise

Quilters' Paradise Quilt Shop, owned and run by Sharon Vesecky, opened its doors in its current location on January 3, 1989.