Weekend Fun & Single Girl Progress

On Friday, July 1st it was Canada Day here. The girls, my hubby and I got into the Canada Day spirit and spent the day at a local park meeting Care Bears, seals, etc. It was really cute. We later had a barbeque and then saw some great fireworks in the evening. It was the first time I took Miss G to our local fireworks and it definitely didn't disappoint. Her heart was beating fast as she sat on my lap and she squealed with delight....it was awesome!

We had to make do with some lipstick to make a maple leaf on her cheek as we didn't have a tattoo for Miss G....she still loved it! Miss P had her little moose Canada shirt on too:)

Hope you all had a great Canada Day and 4th of July weekend! I`m sad it`s over too soon!

For the last week I`ve been working on the Single Girl Quilt - basting and quilting.

As for the quilting I knew I definitely wanted to try out straight lines because I love the modern effect it gives quilts and I had never done it before. My dilemma was in the choice of thread color and whether or not to quilt through the rings. I actually flickr`d a couple of folks (thanks to twinfibers and imagingermonkey) and came up with using a dark thread to match my background which is Kona raisin and quilting three quarter inch lines. I decided not to quilt through the rings because the thread color was so dark and detracted from the fabrics and overall design of the quilt. If my fabric background had been lighter I would have quilted through the rings.

The lesson I learned with this project is to always go with and trust your first instinct because these were my original thoughts! Of course I didn`t do this originally which meant an evening of seam ripping. Did I mention how much I hate seam ripping...aghhh. Lesson learned!

I`m nearing the end of the quilting so I can`t wait to show you the finished product!

Single Girl Quilt Top

Except for the borders, I'm finished piecing the single girl quilt top. I set aside some time yesterday afternoon (while my husband looked after our little one) and sewed my little heart away. That made me happy...I felt like I got something accomplished! Yeh!

I must admit - I did make a small mistake and sewed the blocks together with a 1/2 inch seam instead of 1/4 of an inch. I couldn't find my pattern with all of this reorganizing that's been going on in my house so I just made the seams a bit bigger. It's fine - it just made the overall size a tad smaller. It's going to be a little playmat for Miss P anyway, although Miss G might steal it away from her little sister (that's been known to happen since Miss P was born!)

I'm really glad I had a chance to work on curved seams. Once I found a method that worked for me, it was no problem. (The best way I've found to piece the inner and outer backgrounds to your rings is to first crease each piece in the middle (as suggested in the quilt along and DS' instructions) and place a pin - then match up your ends and pin, THEN go back between your three pins and pin appropriately. This avoids your ends not matching up/fabric overhang once completed.)

I'm still contemplating making a bigger version using my DS stash. We'll have to see. I'd also love to do this pattern using solids. It would look really cool!

The single girl quilt pattern is a great project to work on in stages given the tedious nature of using pattern pieces but the results are definitely worth the effort!