sewing weekend

I'm super busy at work today (two days' worth of work jammed into one) and don't have time to post much.  However, I did make yesterday a sewing day (my Honey even brought me breakfast and dinner while I worked!), which I had to interrupt only for a quilt guild board meeting in the evening.  I was able to finish up the Civil War Chronicles border and backing on Friday and Saturday, and got the shoes all set into shelf-like sashing boxes on Monday morning, so I rewarded myself with beginning a new project on Monday.

I had not yet made my Honey his own quilt although I'd bought a fat eighth bundle of Panier de Fleurs, which I thought was refined (prints) and masculine (colors).  I'd been tossing around ideas for a pattern forever until I won and received the latest Quiltmaker 100 Blocks issue.  Coincidentally, it's Lee Heinrich's block - it was at her blog, Freshly Pieced, that I won the issue - which I chose to make my Honey's quilt with.  I bought some Moda Bella solids that coordinate well with the line - Stone, Tomato Soup, American Blue - and used one of the alternative layouts that Lee featured on her blog.  I cut out the pieces while watching the 25th anniversary production of Les Miserables, which was very moving (especially on Memorial Day when working with French General fabrics!) and pieced a first block to test before I went through all the marking and piecing of all the parts which made up the block.

(Sorry about the shadow - it's hard not to get a little bit of shadow in a photo in my sewing room!)

As I worked, I thought about a title for it which would suit both the fabric and my Honey.  He is a big New York Yankees fan, and asked for a quilt which memorialized that, so I thought about backing the quilt with an applique logo in the center to make it reversible.  The Moda Bella American Blue really reminds me of the Yankees' blue, and the colors just strike me as so vintage patriotic.  I liked the word Yankee as he is a transplanted northerner - a freethinking atheist here in the Bible belt - but so many of the clichéd expressions with Yankee in them are so negative.  So I thought I might simply call it "Yankee Husband."

I am string piecing the rest of the quilt so I will probably not have another photo to share until all the blocks are done.  I love how crisp the solids look in Lee's Cathedral Square layout with the Panier prints mixed in.  I should have a few more sewing days on my agenda coming up so I think it will be done before we know it.  To speed the sewing of multiple blocks, I did sew 2" x WOF strips of stone and red together and crosscut the pieces next to the flying geese, and the flying geese method makes four at a time, so I can't imagine this won't go super fast.

Both Civil War Chronicles and Spanish Treasure to go my longarm quilter this week, the former to be basted and the latter quilted, so progress is being made right and left.  Yay!