OMG--Buckeye Beauty Finish

Hello from the deep freeze!  It was -7 degrees Fahrenheit this morning, which is the first time we've been this cold this winter.  Since it's our last red day for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, I'm posting this cheerful picture of my geranium blooming on the window sill just before Christmas.  The blooms are gone now, but the cheerfulness remains.

Here's more cheer--a finished Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilt!  This is my Buckeye Beauty.  In 2017, I pieced the blocks for this quilt, one color at a time, as a Rainbow Scrap quilt.  It was so much fun, scrounging around in my scraps for feedsacks or 1930s reproductions in the right colors.  The block was really easy to make, too, which doesn't hurt.

In January of 2018, I completed the top.  I arranged the blocks like this to get a secondary design, and added a feedsack border.  Luckily, I had two feedsacks in the same print.


Once I finished the top, I set it aside to work on other things.  It waited for a whole year, stuck in the closet with all the other "ladies in waiting".
This year, I'm leaving dithering behind.  I'm making decisions, setting goals, and finishing quilts.  At least, that's the idea.

So I got started quilting, and finished the center.  When it was time to quilt the border, dithering started to happen again.  How should I quilt it?  Fancy quilting would be lost in the print.  But I needed fairly dense quilting to match the rest of the quilt and fit the vintage look.

That's when the OMG helped.  OMG=One Monthly Goal.  It's a program run by Patty of Elm Street Quilts.  I made it my goal for January to decide on a design, quilt the border, and bind the quilt.  It worked!  I quilted double diagonal lines, evenly spaced to match the divisions in the quilt blocks.

And I was right, you really can't see the quilting in the border unless you get up close, but that's okay, I know it's there.
Want to see the back?

This is the back of the Buckeye Beauty quilt.  It is (mostly) 6 feedsacks sewn together.  I bought it in an antique shop years ago, as a duvet cover.  I had to mend it and add a strip or two of another feedsack to make it big enough.

One of my favorite prints is this one--blue raspberries!  I don't think such a thing occurs in nature, but it's fun to have it on the backing.

So that's one OMG done.  And that's about how my New Year's resolutions usually go.  I might do well in January, but it's more of a challenge to keep going after that.  I can't even tell you how many journals/diaries I have that only have entries for the first 4 weeks of the year.  (It's very sad.)  I have to hope this time it will be different, if only for the sake of all the UFOs stuck in the closet.

In other news, new potholders!  Most of my potholders are not fit to be seen--holes, stains, etc.  Plus I forget to throw them in the laundry half the time, so who knows what awful spills are on them.  These orphan blocks are really outclassing the rest of the potholders in the drawer.  I took a picture so I'll know what they looked like before they got to work in my messy kitchen.

I have some time off from babysitting this week.  Little Buddy and his family are at a wedding, so I'll have extra time to sew (oh, and maybe clean a little?).  He posed for me earlier this week with a panel I got for free from a nice quilter at quilt group.  We have a panel challenge for next month, and I'm thinking about using this one.
I don't know though, I'm feeling kind of dither-y about it.
Stay warm, and keep quilting!
Cheers,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:
Patty at Elm Street Quilts for January's OMG
Sarah at Can I Get A Whoop Whoop 
Angela at Soscrappy
Cynthia at Oh Scrap
Myra at Busy Hands Quilts