A Bit Behind

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February was a very full month--besides my brother's birthday, Valentine's Day, my mother's 75th birthday, finishing the baby quilt, another trip to the hospital ER for me, our anniversary, and the ultra-excitement of the birth of our first grandchild, there was something else that I got a bit behind on.  I'm now caught up on this small Civil War scrap project, which when last shown was only a flimsy: 

Over the last couple of days I got the quilt sandwich pin basted, then promptly unbasted it about an hour later when I decided to use a motif in the plain alternate squares.  This came to me as I was fanning myself during a PSW (personal weather system) and noticed the bird emblem on the pretty Japanese fan I recently bought for said PSWs. Ahem.  Anyway, back to the quilt.

I drew a bird and then used a light box and a Frixion gel pen to transfer my drawing. Then I repinned the quilt sandwich and did some stitch in the ditch and cross-hatching with the walking foot. 

The walking foot worked just fine to stitch the bird with a contrasting thread--I'm lazy, so didn't want to change to the darning foot!

You can see in this photo where I drew corner triangles around the bird.  I decided to stitch those in the same burgundy thread I used for the bird, but changed it up as I stitched.

I showed this to my sister and she said it was too much--instead of flowing around the quilt, the eye stopped on the bird and you didn't see the other elements.  Well, it is a stop sign shape, but that wasn't my intention!  So I unsewed the octagon and told my sister she was right.  But there still wasn't enough quilting of the basic elements for me, so I added more. 

The 9 patch dark squares were fully X'd and the light patches got a "square in a square" design that I marked by scoring.  This meant a LOT of thread burying afterwards, but I think it was a good choice.  I also re-stitched those corner triangles in the cream thread to flesh out the traditional quilting I felt was needed. On to the border...

Hard to see here, but I had fun free motion quilting a sort of trellis design with dark brown thread.  

Or maybe those are L's like Laverne had on her clothes in Laverne and Shirley.  I loved that silly show.  Anyway, I used more leftovers to make the binding, a Collection for A Cause fabric I just love and used as borders on my Caramel Blues quilt.

And here is the finished quilt!  It is about 25" square and all machine sewn and machine quilted, crafted completely from leftovers.  I even stitched together batting scraps for the project!  What do you think?

The other event I didn't mention above was my five year blogiversary, which was February 5th, and I am giving away this little quilt to celebrate!  There are no hoops to jump through, except that I must have a way to contact you if you are not on Blogger--please leave your email address in the comment.  I will leave this giveaway open until Friday, March 7th, at 6 pm Pacific time, and I will ship internationally.  Thank you, dear readers, for sticking with me this last year of scanty blogging!