Cleaning House

I'm dedicating most of my time this week to cleaning my house. This is my deep cleaning where I steam carpets, etc. I have a white carpet in my living room and dining room that is really hard to keep clean, so I end up cleaning the carpet at least once a month-ugh! That carpet will be history soon as we are installing hardwood floor sometime this winter, but in the meantime I still have this compulsion to do something to keep it presentable.

So I'm taking a short break from quilting today. The girls and I are visiting the library for more books for school, then I'm tackling the carpet.

Here's a photo of a quilt I completed back in 2002. It's from the book Rose Sampler Quilt. I hand appliqued these blocks using Eleanor Burns method of stitching interfacing to fronts of the applique pieces and slitting the interfacing, turning the pieces, pressing them and securing them in place on the block. My interfacing was a bit too heavy and I didn't like the results, but it did give me lots of practice with applique. I quit at 5 applique blocks and added these alternate blocks of which I can't remember the name of the block to save my life! I'll have to go look it up. This is also the first quilt I custom quilted on my longarm machine.

I started this quilt with needle turn applique and it was a mess. After appliqueing part of one block with this method, I switched to Eleanor's method which was better. Now-a-days I use applique almost exclusively in my landscape quilts, but I use my own glue-basting technique. It's much faster and for me I get better results. One of these day's I'll have to try needleturn applique again.