Brianna has returned to Scotland to do more research on Jamie’s life and also because she has developed a love interest in Roger Wakefield. Brianna decides to go through the stones when she finds a newspaper clipping showing that Jamie and Claire perished in a house fire; she wants to warn them in the hopes that they can change history. Roger guesses at Brianna’s plan and goes through the stones himself about a month later.
Jamie, Brianna, Claire and Ian all eventually meet up at Fraser’s Ridge but Roger has a much harder time. When he finally does get the Ridge he is mistaken for the assailant who has left Brianna pregnant. Rather than murdering him, Jamie sends him off as a slave to one of the native tribes. As part of the bargain to free Roger, Ian must stay behind with the Iroquois.
As part of last Christmas’s 12 Days package each family received a colouring book with quilt blocks. I asked them to colour a few blocks and send me their favourites. Madison was the only one who sent me a photo of the block she created. So for her birthday “card” I decided to make the block for her.
I must have looked at her photo a hundred or more times both in the designing stage and in the actual making of the piece. How on earth I made such a glaring error I have no idea. But I didn’t notice it until I was well into the quilting and it was far too late to make the correction.
I ran out of basting spray so had to sandwich using pins. All my big quilting pins were in use in other sandwiches so I had to use the small ones. With my numb fingers it was a challenge to get the pins closed. Another challenge was getting the pins open and removed as I ran up against them in the quilting process. Tying and burying the ends was also difficult.
Except for the mistake I made I’m happy with how it turned out. When I started quilting I had no idea what patterns I would use in the blocks but as I finished the first bit ideas came to me. It is all straight lines but I’m pleased with the effect.
I used one of my own coloured pieces for the label.
The Buds of May (Bonus Block from The Splendid Sampler series)
I’ve been wanting to use this block pattern for awhile now. Although Emma’s birthday falls a month before May, I liked the pattern so went ahead and made it.
I haven’t done much appliqué of late but my piecing machine has a clear foot that makes staying at the edge of the fabric quite easy.
Another product from a sewing day with Stacia and Deloise.
Thanks to my scrap collection I had almost enough of those tiny (one-inch finished) half-square triangles already made. I used leaders and enders to complete the 144 that I needed. Much to my surprise, as I was sorting through scraps to make the triangles I found so many that I’ve had to dedicate a shoebox just to triangles. I also had almost enough of the larger half-square triangles in my stash.
On an earlier project Stacia mentioned she had problems with a border of HSTs so I adjusted the pattern assembly so that I was sewing a portion of the border with each block. When I was ready to sandwich the project I remembered that using the small pins to baste was really hard on my fingers. Since I only had the small pins available I dug out a community quilt that was ready for quilting. I only quilted enough of it to get some larger pins for sandwiching.
I’m not happy with the quilting; it took me a long time to figure out a quilting pattern and then a long time getting into the rhythm. As my fingers have such a hard time tying thread ends and burying them I went with Stacia’s suggestion of backstitching each beginning and ending so I didn’t need to tie or bury. That worked well. As I quilted though I had some bunching around some of the HSTs; I maybe should have basted it better or done my quilting in a different order.
The binding also posed some problems. Again, because my fingers don’t work as they should, I did a machine-stitched binding. It seemed to be going well until I was almost at the end and I noticed I had missed the seam in one stretch. Because I was sewing with black thread on black it was very hard to pick the stitching out. Added to that was the fact that I was using Bottom Line thread so it was nearly invisible.
I’m glad to be moving on to the next project in the book.
