Irons in the Fire

I truly thought the new year would find me to be better at daily blogging, but I seem to have too many irons in the fire for that. There's food to cook, school to teach, a puppy to train, visiting to do, and quilts to make. Oh! The quilts!

Since I last occupied this space I made a trip to Pennsylvania to celebrate my parents' 45th anniversary. It was a wonderful visit full of relatives, playing games, and good food. And snow! More snow than we've seen here all winter all in one Saturday there. The weekend went by much too fast, and I soon found myself at home once again, but needed a week to recover from the travel. Does that happen to you, too?

Back to the quilts:

Instant gratification x 2. I finished my second mug rug a few weeks back already. You may remember it from this post, hanging on the design wall, ready to be hand-stitched.

Now that it's finished, it happily resides beside my rocking chair, next to its counterpart. One for me, and one for him!

And here's the quilted wall-hanging that inspired the mug rugs in the first place:

I call it Can't See the Forest for the Trees. Each tree is unique, as are the backgrounds that each tree is set against. Not meant to be Christmas-y, but woodsy instead, it measures 19 inches square, and hangs on my dining room wall. It's hand-quilted with the exception of the outside borders, which I meandered on the machine.

After completing the project I washed it so that it has that aged, pucker-y look.

A view of the back: I cut two pieces of fabric 4 inches square, and folded them in half diagonally. I placed each triangle even with the upper outside corner of the quilt, and stitched them into place at the same time as attaching the binding to the front of the quilt. As I sewed the binding to the back by hand, the raw edges were covered. This created little pockets to run a dowel rod through, and made it easy to hang the quilt without having it sag in the middle.