Antique Wedding Sampler Goal #10

Where has the past two weeks gone?  I'm sure many of you think the same thing sometimes. 

I still have two rooms of Christmas decorations to take down (living room and dining room).  One of them has the last tree to disassemble.  All the other rooms in the house now show NO SIGNS of the holiday anywhere.  Most of the totes and boxes are neatly stacked in the storage area under the basement stairs.  A few totes still linger in the laundry room waiting for the rest of their kind before I have to find a place on the shelves in the back storage room.

I made a big push the past few days to get to this point.  And because of that, my sewing time was almost nil.  I did manage to get the embroidery finished on the Wool Tray Mat #2 on my goal list.

I still need to fuse the stabilizer (I like to use Form Flex 1010) to the back of this wool top.  It will help the wool from moving and stretching.  Then I will cut a backing and blanket stitch it to the front along the outer edge.  My goal is to have everything except the stitching done today.

Goal #10 was my Antique Wedding Sampler.  I did audition fabrics for the sash and border.  My thought during this project was to use this blue border print and this blue/gray material I had in my stash.

Love the border print, but it just didn't hit me like I thought it would.  Even though my blocks contain many colors, the reds and pinks show more prominently.  My thought was that this blue border would tame them and let the other colors shine as well.

So on hunt for another border print.

 

I dug into my Dutch Heritage fabrics (repro 1800 prints from the Dutch Netherlands) and found this beauty.  This was the one!  But the sashing was still not thrilling me.  So back into the stacks of fabrics on my shelves to find something that did hit me.  As hard as I tried to stay away from those reds/pinks that were so prominent in the quilt and now in the border as well, they kept calling me to that section of the stash.  

This floral was the one!  It was actually a small stripe print from one of Di Ford Hall's collections.  Fitting as this Antique Wedding Sampler is from her book "Primarily Patchwork", which was the name of her quilt shop in Australia.

Those stacks of brown print will go back into the stash for a future quilt.

          

I managed to get two rows together.  Did you notice that the print was directional?  All block sashing is headed with the larger dark pink flower toward the upper left.  All of the sash between the rows will be headed to the upper right.  But I needed a cornerstone.  I LOVE cornerstones.  It gives a little more definition between the blocks and it is so much easier for my rows to fit together.  No guesswork.  Just match seam for seam and sew! 

I settled for a brown that matched the color of the stripes I wasn't using.  

My challenge for the "Queenagers" is to have this top put together except for the four corners and outer border.  Better get to work!

I think I've gotten a good start on my goals for the year.  Hopefully it will stay that way.  

Keep sewing,

Jan