Design Wall Monday

Happy Memorial Day!  On my design surface is the doll quilt swap project from last week.  I survived assembly, with the paper piecing messy aftermath :)

I had considered reducing the project to only two blocks since it was looking rather busy, but in the end I just rearranged the blocks to a different layout and felt that calmed it down a bit.

The quilting design is always a bit of a roadblock to me.  However, I knew I wanted to avoid the very thick intersection in the center and chose a motif to use in each of the blocks. 

This is "Friendship Blossom", from a book I just bought called 501 Quilting Motifs, by Quiltmaker magazine.  Lots of great designs of every sort, with helpful illustrations of the different ways the motif can be used for either hand or machine quilting.  Time being short, and my hand-quilting skills not being great, I opted for machine quilting.  For marking the light fabrics I used my water soluble blue marker, and for the dark fabrics a yellow chalk pencil.  I've now quilted all the motifs and am doing some straight line quilting in each block.  Next decision is what to use for binding, and what to put on the label. This project needs to get in the mail by Thursday, so decisions need to turn into action quickly! 

Also completed this week was the stitching closed all the the pillow butts for my outdoor patio set.  I love how they turned out and they sure brighten up the plain brown cushions. 

My daughter and I even found an umbrella that matched pretty well with the blue background--it is really more of a teal blue, very richly saturated.  See more design walls on Judy's Patchwork Times.

This will be a busy week--mainly due to starting training for my new job.  Yep, I took a part-time job as a scribe for a family practice group and will be working with a single doctor.  That will be a welcome change. And when I called a doctor I worked for to let him know I was using him as a reference, he wanted to hire me back as his office manager.  I'll start that in several weeks once my training is complete.  So I'll have two part-time jobs, both local.  No more commuting for me.  I felt like I hadn't lived in my own town for two years with my prior job, and with this one, I can even come home for lunch, yay!