Another finish

Last night I finished my Alabama Beauty quilt. Yeah! Just in time to put away quilting for the summer! I had Tetsu hang this in our entry this morning. (Yes, that is Choco's sleeping kennel in our entry. No midnight thief would dare come in the front door at our house!)

I chose to stitch-in-the-ditch by hand on this quilt but you can't really see any of the work. I look at these pictures now and wonder why I chose this lay out... or if I made a mistake when putting the blocks together. Some of those blue blocks really stand out.

This quilt was started two summers ago... Almost three years in the making! I saw the pattern on someone's blog but they seemed to be using Inklingo which I don't have so I made my own pattern. I quickly found that all those tiny points and the center seams made this a more difficult quilt than I'd imagined, but nice things take hard work.

I was working with batiks at the time and batiks seemed to go together with the darker colors. Later I started raiding my scrap box and pretty soon I had two piles dark background and light background blocks. On the final placement, I tried to move the backgrounds from dark to light but a couple of those blocks seem out of place now. Not wrong, just maybe not what I'd planned. Oh well.

********************

Fifty-seven.

That's what I am today. And as a birthday present I requested having hand rails put in on our stairway. Foot problems still persist and I limp down the stairs in the morning (after that I'm pretty good) so I thought hand rails might be a blessing. Tetsu spent one day streaming with sweat putting in hand rails in two places on the stairs and now I can gracefully glide down... hanging on the handrail. Another gift of love from Tetsu (he wouldn't think of asking a professional to install them!)