Dreadline, hold on, no, deadline

But I dread it! My husband has booked a trip to go see the recipient on June 3rd. I must be done by then. But with just the quilting to finish - should take me about five evenings - and the whole thing to be washed, I should be fine, I hope.

All was well ... as you can tell ...

and I was very pleased ... until I turned the bugger over and saw ...



WRINKLES!!! Way more wrinkles than I could possibly bear.



So I undid all my quilting and painstakingly tacked and pinned the top to the fleece backing. It now looks like I actually know what I'm doing. I hate it when I think I can get away with skipping a step and then don't ...

By the way, the baby is one day shy of four weeks old now.

Quilting away ...

This is a tiny bit unwieldy at the moment but I am happily quilting along the lines my quilting pencil has now decided to leave behind on my fabric.

Sailing right along ...

I'm quite pleased with how the "body" of the sun turned out. I "measured" the middle of the quilt and folded away the outer third of the yellowy centre. Then I got out a dinner plate as stencil, plonked that down, circled it with a quilting pen, got out my embroidering frame and off I took.

Now I need to work on the sun beams. I will do a variation on below's sun with straight and curvey beams alternating and a total of eight beams. All I need to do now is figure out how to make myself a pattern to pin down.

Making my stencil

Then again, maybe not!

This is the throw I was talking about:



And the sun is way fussier that I remembered. I think I may have to design my onw based on this.

More ideas for bags:

I went to Brum this weekend. Brum, you may wonder? Yes, Brum, Birmingham, Britain's Second City ... and I found inspiration once again. I couldn't justify buying the bags because I have so much material to make my own - plus no real use for them. But I thought I'd "document" for future reference:







In the meantime, I finished applique-ing all those little animal squares. Now I'll tidy seams while working up the courage to start the sun design for the quilted middle. I'll take that off a throw I purchased ages ago ... and we shall see how well that works. I'm thinking baking sheets and pins will do the trick ...