Colorways by Vicki Welsh

Yesterday was the day to start working on the Eclipse quilt. First I had to clean off my work surfaces in the sewing room and that took over an hour. Things had been piling up while I worked on moving the blog and website.

For those of you who wonder why I’ve moved the blog, here’s the background. I moved to Weebly in 2016 because I decided to move my shop off Etsy and set up a dedicated eCommerce site. Several years ago Weebly was purchased by Square and they stopped working on Weebly but I was just too lazy to move while the shop was open. But the motivation came when I found out they were stopping support of Weebly this summer. It was time to move!

In the end, I’m glad I did. WordPress is a much better platform. I can bulk manage blog posts. In Weebly, if I wanted to delete a category of posts, I had to do them individually! On top of that, the editor didn’t even have an “undo” function. The move was worth the effort and I thank you for following me here.

Now, that it’s done I can get on to fun things again!

After I cleared the cutting table I got all of the fabrics ironed.

Next it was time to get the pattern out. This pattern is Eclipse by Judy Neimeyer. For those of you not familiar with Judy’s patterns, let me give you a brief introduction. These patterns are not for the faint of heart. They are complex but they are incredibly well designed. On of my favorite features is the effort they go to to avoid having points end at seam intersections. It helps to eliminate bulk at the center of star motifs. The instructions are so thorough. The instruction booklet for this quilt is 29 pages long. It covers every single step from how to cut out pieces for a section, how to stack the pieces in preparation for sewing and, of course, how to sew them together. These patterns are foundation pieced on newsprint type paper.

For every section there are foundation papers (top) and papers that are cutting guides (bottom).

I spent some time going through all the sheets and familiarizing myself with the sections.

There’s even a large sheet showing the order for putting the quilt together.

I know a lot of people get hives just thinking about doing a project as precise and detailed as this but I really groove on this. I’m going to get it all cut out and will take it to Maine in August to sew on vacation.

Along with getting the blog/website moved, I’ve been helping Chris process a lot of wood to stockpile for next winter. This area is what I call the fuel depot with firewood and propane. Chris cut and I stacked all the wood on the left. There are 4 rows and he split all of it. He certainly got his exercise the last few weeks!

There is this much left over that we don’t have room for! This is all going to a friend’s house next week. Today we start a major heat wave so I think we’ll be staying inside and, hopefully, I’ll get a lot of fabric cutting done.