Show and Tell Time

 Tuesday evening our quilt club had its final meeting for this season.  We have a
quilt show and invite lots of friends and "future quilters."  We bring the quilted things we made the past year and each member brings some snack goodies to share.  I desperately wanted to finish the huge quilt I've been working on and sewed until 4:30 p.m. to try to finish it.  Here you see that monster having the final borders sewed on.  That's as far as I got!  The borders still need to be quilted, and the binding needs to be applied.  But I was satisfied that it looked much the way it will when those few tasks as completed.

Getting that far gave me "permission" to dive into a new project.  I've been wanting to start making some "Delectable Mountains" blocks, debating whether to stick with a certain colour scheme, or to make it completely scrappy.  Scrappy won the day and that's why all these bins of fabric are spread out on the sewing room floor.

Wednesday morning I chose fabrics and cut out 32 light 8 1/2" blocks and 32 dark 8 1/2" blocks.  Another day I'll picture and explain the steps in making a Delectable Mountains quilt, but for now, here's the result of two days of cutting and sewing:

This will become a lap quilt, measuring 48" by 60".  I won't add borders, as that is already very large for a lap quilt.  The finished quilt will serve as a sample when I teach how to make this block in our next season, both here and in Arizona.

I'm happy with the way it's turning out.  Nice and bright and cheerful.  I'm almost half way through making blocks.  When they are all completed, I will shift them around to find a balance in colours.

In the meantime I've revived D.S. #2's sock project.  I had finished one and was working on the second when I had to stop knitting because of the pain of a "trigger finger."  That has now healed, thanks to an injection and some physiotherapy.

The finished sock is on the left, quite a bit shorter than the second sock.  The yarn came in a single 100 gram hank, so it was a little hard to know when to stop knitting the first sock and begin the second.  Two 50 gram balls actually are easier to manage.  I tried to create that division by weighing the yarn at the beginning, but that didn't work out.

This morning I "unknit" the ribbing on the first sock and will now use up the remaining yarn to "equalize" the length of the two socks.

This is a particularly nice yarn, a Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine, 50% Peruvian Wool, 20% Super Fine Alpaca and 30% nylon.  I'm using 2.5 mm needles, so this sock has more stitches than usual, a finer gauge than I usually use for socks.  But it's just lovely yarn, and I think these socks will be a real comfort to wear.