Crabapples!

The borders are ON! I can't go any farther with this. And for those of you wondering, I am still quilting customer's quilts, in fact am in full swing for the holidays...so any piecing time for me comes before 9am, and after 5pm, and on Sundays which is the one day I don't work on customer quilts if at all possible!That's why it seems the biggest push for me gets done over a weekend when my "days off" are supposed to be:c) I try as best as I can to work my quilt job like a normal 9-5 job with massaging scheduled in between. Sometimes I am successful at it, sometimes I get behind. It's hard to schedule your life in advance when you don't know what whammies it is going to throw you!

Would you believe I made WAY MORE checker parts than I needed to? Of course! Who is actually counting when you are dealing with random short strips? All I was thinking is I needed 864 individual squares for the border, and that seemed daunting so I kept piecing strip sets together!

Now I'm going to have a bunch of scrappy 9 patches to play with later on down the line.


The quilting on this one is going to have to be later down the line too because I've got too much in the queue. That's fine with me, I'm not sure how I want to quilt it anyway! Those big setting triangles have wide open space for some designing....the trees themselves are busy and full of lots of seam allowance. I was thinking diagonal lines from top to bottom, old style.

The outer border was an after thought. It still kind of is. I can say that when piecing a border from a gadzillion 1" finished squares, that border is going to be stretchy and wavy no matter what you do because of the weight more than anything. So I like to add one more border to sandwich it in between two "stable" pieces. Then it also won't get too chopped off in the binding or stretch too far out of whack while quilting. After I got the checkered border on there, I tried EVERYTHING in every color to find something that would work for the outer one. Green was too much green....gold was just too soft for the darks in the quilt center....red was TOO red and made it look like Christmas. This is actually a red with black. So it has the look of a dark dark red, and it seemed to be best to me. Oh, and the quilt top finished at approx 70"X70" (Tree blocks are 8")

My mind has been running to and fro, and can't seem to settle at all. I think that is why I have been such a piecing hound over the past few weeks. With DH's job closing looming closer...(and that putting us right in the middle of the holidays) And his not having found another job yet...I'm finding it harder and harder not to panic. So I stay busy. It really IS out of my hands. I can't get him a job..I can't march up to the plant manager of the plant that is close to us and say "You must hire him because we want to stay here". I'm having a hard time letting go and letting life take me where it wants me to be.

He has an interview in Atlanta on Wednesday at the head quarters of the place that is close to us here..but they have 3 plant openings, and two of those would move us out of the area. Only one would keep us here. The interview in Winston-Salem has him thinking he wants THAT job....

There is one more in Eastern NC that he is waiting to hear back from, he got a phone call from them the other night and said they would get back to him.

And I still haven't told anyone at my massage job because I don't really have anything to tell until these interviews are done. But still it is killing me. It takes all of us there to make the rent, and if one leaves, the others have to carry that extra rent amount. I don't want anyone to have to do that for me. I feel bad about that...but I don't know if I am staying or going, so what good does it do to put THEM up in a tizzy?

Off to machine quilt for a while.....