Today needs to be a house day . . .

There is dirty laundry on the bedroom floor and the sheets need changing.  The laundry baskets in the garage are already overflowing.  The dining room table is covered with "stuff" that needs to be dealt with.  I need to get something out of the freezer to cook for dinner.

So what am I doing?  Procrastinating by reading email, blogs, and other quilty stuff on the computer.  And now I'm posting.  That is the last thing I'm going to do before getting to the stuff I should be doing.

Last night after I finished the quilt top and put the remaining fabric away, I took out my hand quilting.  It has been sitting in the corner for awhile calling to me, "I'm over half done!  Why don't you finish me?"  It's been at least 3-4 years since I did any hand quilting, and at first it seemed a bit clumsy.  My fingers had forgotten how.  After so many years I thought my hands would always have muscle memory for that process.  It returned after a half hour or so - thank goodness!

This is an OLD quilt top - 2002.  It's a Jo Morton design called "Emma's Quilt".  I took a class with Jo at a local "primitive" event.  It's amazing to see how my color sense has grown; this seems so very plain now with such few fabrics.  The fabric was old when I made the top, and not nearly as good in quality as I use now.  It still deserves to be finished.

I'm currently "quilting in the ditch", which I hate to do.  That's probably why this has sat unfinished for so long.  Once I finish this red and cream triangle border the outside border is all that is left.  I'm determined to push on to the finish.

I think I've settled on the fabrics I want to use for this quilt.  Do you remember this quilt top?  I made it in the first of four year-long quilt history classes with Eileen Trestain.  All the fabrics I used during this top were authentic reproductions of pre-1830's fabrics.  This was a time of bright, colorful fabrics and medallion quilts.  I have an entire shelf full of fabrics left over from that class that I think will work beautifully for "Stars and Sprigs".  Many of these are lights, so if I don't have enough choices for all the leaves I will supplement with fabrics from the 1830's and 1840's eras.  I will use a plain ecru background that Eileen says is the most like fabric from those eras.  I bought an entire bolt while I was taking the class.

And I just thought of one more thing I can do - print foundations for Civil War Diaries.  So I guess I'm still procrastinating.