Whoo whooo. The mystery quilt came back from the longarmer and Mike & I were beside ourselves with delight. Amy (my go-to longarm quilter) chose a “bubble” quilting pattern using white thread and we think it’s outstanding. Zoom in a bit and you can see the bubbles dancing around the quilt.

I am so delighted with this quilt that I’ve signed on to do another (different) mystery quilt. I’ll tell you about it in August.

You’ll recall that I started paper piecing in my last update and I decided to use “Waiting for Rain” to practice mitered corners (see next entry). Mitered corners are a bit tricky and I wanted a double border. Here’s how my first attempt worked out.

The borders turned out pretty well for a first attempt but the whole thing is a bit funky and warped looking. I’ll be doing some more practice to see if I can get better at this process.

Some of you know that my brother died in January 2023; I am now the last living member of a family of six. I’ve had a memorial quilt in mind since then and in February I found the perfect pattern and some great new fabric I haven’t worked with called “shot cotton”. Shot cotton uses two different colors of thread for the warp and weft (horizontal and vertical threads) to create the fabric. I started cutting the fabric but laid it aside until a week or two ago. Here’s the quilt top with the blocks completed.

The official name of the pattern is “Aftershock” by Wren Collective. I call it “Family Birthstones” because I used birthstone colors to denote family members. The first is my dad Edwyn, then my sister Lydia, then my mom Dean, then sister Sue, then my brother Mike. My sisters and brother are indented to show family relationships.

I decided I wanted two borders for this quilt and I wanted mitered corners rather than butt corners hence the practice with mitered corners above.