The past few days have been a whirlwind of activity. Seems like all of the sudden I have multiple finishes and progress. I know I have been steadily working towards this though, so why am I surprised. I have been thinking about the ways I work at quilting and creating and how it is different than your average Jane “the lady who quilts”. I am a split personality, I quilt for myself and for others. I have many ufo’s and many in progress personal quilts, and then I have many in progress “for sale” quilts. There really aren’t any UFO’s in that group, they are either finished or repurposed. These past few weeks I have been working on shop restocking. I really wanted to get some more Halloween themed quilts up and ready for September sales. Looking back through past sale years, Sept-Oct is my busiest season.

I am working on getting nine quilts posted to the store. That means ninety post-able photos, nine “Look at Me!” titles, nine engaging descriptions, and 117 unique SEO tags, all told. That’s a lot of creative writing, and I have been employing my assistant, better known as GPTchat, to help a little. I hope to have this chore finished by this weekend, although it’s coming up fast.

In the almost finished category this week, is the Message in a Bottle BOM. I am really pleased with how this turned out, there is a lot going on in this quilt. The center is finished, the borders are not. There are 32 blocks to make, with appliqué, 16 have four leaves and 16 have a shield and a dot. I wish I had had the fabric to make a few of these a month, well, I sort of did, but didn’t plan ahead. I started this BOM in August 2022, ugh, meaning I have been slogging along for three years on this. I am entertaining the thought of machine stitching these border blocks. The prep work takes about the same amount of time as hand appliqué. I could do some raw edge, but then it may look weird to have the neat and tidy hand turned appliqué next to the scruffy raw edge.

Speaking of appliqué, I got this huge (24″x 36″ (not really) appliqué block/top ready for stitching. I used Flexi-Fuse, as I have had good results with it in the past, and it comes in 21 inch wide rolls. These patterns, from Pacific Rim Quilt Company are called two fabric appliqué, and are done in a similar way to Hawaiian quilts. Large pieces layered and cut away to reveal the background. Since this is a commission quilt for me, I needed to get it done before Halloween 2025. I spent a few hours prepping and sticking this together, now I need to machine stitch the edges and then quilt it.

I received the fabric for the next few Halloween quilts to be made, “Hocus Pocus”, most of the fabric for “Spooks and Spells” is coming in Saturday, and the kit for “Happy’s Place” is already to go/cut. That makes three, plus the commissioned one, Candy Corn, four more Halloween quilts. I finished two “Witching hour”, and two “Pumpkin Patch” quilts in August, I think I am going to be thoroughly done with black and orange by October.

I have been devoting a little stitching time to Consider the Lillies the past few nights. The carnation took a bit of time, but then the smaller flowers can be done in one session. I had to print out the last row of pattern pages, yay, I am hopeful that I will finish this behemoth, the last row of pattern pages are 1/3rd filled.

Be Kind.