WiP Wednesday: Start and Nearing a Finish

 I have such a long list of quilts to make it's not even funny.  I have the fabric for eight in my house right now.  That's not just stash that fabric that was specifically purchased to make quilts.  Five are in some range from cut to completed but the other three are just in the planning stages.  The fifth one started this week.  Seriously I'm amazing how I get myself into these situations.  I suggested to a friend who is over 37 weeks pregnant that I make a quilt for her baby and she was so cute and so excited I knew I had to get on it.  Then the other six I was working on took a back seat yesterday and I got started.  I also have make some great progress on my Tetris quilting and I hope to get it done in time for the parade on Sept 11th.

Since both the quilts I'm working on are totally works in progress I thought I'd link up with WiP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced where Michelle from CityHouseStudio was kind enough to be the guest blogger this week.

 I'll start with my start and then go on to the Tetris quilting.

This is the beginnings of the quilt for my pregnant friend.  I know I probably should have gone with something a little simpler/faster than a HST quilt.  Especially this one where there are 560 little triangles to sew together into a baby quilt but I really wanted to try out a whole quilt make of HST and this seems like a really great quilt to try it out on since I don't have to look at it every day and see any imperfection it may or may not have in the end.  I cut all the triangles out with my accuquilt and it took me around an hour to cut out all 560!  Did I mention I love my accuquilt!!  I've sewn over half of them together already and I just started cutting yesterday morning.  It's going much faster than I expected.  I still don't know how I'm going to lay it out in the end but I'm sure I'll have fun playing around.

Now for a hand quilting tip:

First weave the needle through as you normally do.  Then...

Grab the needle with a set of pliers and start to pull it out...

Keep pulling until it becomes easier and you can do it with just your fingers.  Doing it this way has saved my fingers a lot of aches and pains.  I suppose I could try and use a thimble but I really don't like them.  These are part of a jewelery making kit so they are really clean and won't mess up my quilt.  I don't have to try to push the needle through or wiggle and pull.  It just comes so easily like only sewing through one layer.  Give it a try!

Now that I've shown you my method you can see the end result.  This is the extra white space at the top of my tetris quilt.  I'm quilting it in cotton perle in dark gray.  I'm loving how it's turning out!

Down by the pieces of the quilt I'm outlining each whole piece with the gray.  I love how it makes them stand out more and the fun shapes it makes on the back side.  I'm over 1/6 done with it and have only touched it three separate times so it's going pretty fast.

 Thanks for stopping by and be sure to check out other posts in the WiP Wednesday linky.