"Celebrate Spring" quilt

Hive count for today: two very small ones on my arm, which almost immediately faded. Of course the real test will be next week when I go back to my old moldy campus building (and also really HAVE TO do some fieldwork). But I'm definitely feeling better. Probably some of that is finally getting over the stomach bug and being able to eat again, but I think also perhaps the medication is already working to control my allergies better.

Yesterday afternoon and this afternoon, I worked on putting together the "Celebrate Spring" quilt top. This is the one made entirely of cotton lawn, which is much thinner and more delicate than the quilter's cotton I usually use.



It's pretty, but after this quilt I'm permanently going back to quilter's cotton. Lawn ravels a lot more easily, it's surprisingly stretchier (so you have to pin very heavily to get things to go together well) and it's a bit more slippery or flimsy or something and you have to be more cautious working with it.

(Also, you can see my backyard's gotten really unruly. I will have to decide in the next few days if I'm up to mowing myself (will wear a pollen-excluding mask) or if it's better for me to find someone to do it for me, at least for a while. I wonder if lawn services will let you hire them for a short time?)

Here's a close-up.



The multicolored floral in the lower center right is the fabric I bought for the backing, too. As I said before, I'm going to try to find a really lightweight batt - either bamboo, or, if I can find it (and can afford it) silk. And I'm hand quilting this one. I already see how I can do it - and it won't take any marking (it's just going to be doing 1/4" lines inside each square, and then intersecting lines 1/4" away from the edge of each rectangle and small square piece.) But of course, I need to finish the quilt in the frame first...

I have two more quilt tops to set together - a Bento Box out of "funny" blues (odd shades of blue) and the Skinny Dip made from the cute Aneela Hoey "Walk in the Woods" prints.

They also called from the quilt shop to let me know that my future niece's quilt has gone into the quilter and will be done this week. So I think I'm going to put together the backing for my Sherbet Pips top and take that down and drop it off when I get that one...heh, revolving quilts.