After two weeks of playing nurse for a sick friend, I was finally able to get back to my sewing machine and complete my paper pieced wall hanging and catch up on a few things.

This is the hanging before sewing the blocks and borders together. I like to lay things out, see how they look, arrange the directions of the blocks, etc., before sewing. This saves a lot of seam ripping, which is not my favorite thing to do.

When you have a wonky quilting line or just something that you want to cover up, yo-yo's do the trick. This quilt was absolutely square until I started to machine quilt it. Somewhere along the way, it became distorted on a couple of seam lines. Being rushed on time, I didn't have the opportunity to take things apart and fix the distortion. Anyway, the yo-yo's help to cover up the rough spots and even add another dimension and focus.

This is the final wall hanging. It's 25" x 25". It isn't my finest work, but I'm still feeling a great sense of completion. I've been working on this hanging off and on for months, and just seeing it to completion gives me satisfaction. Every project that you work on will teach you some sort of lesson or tip that will be valuable on your next project. We are always our worst critic and need to enjoy the ride with less stress and expectations on ourselves. I'm a bit of a perfectionist and this quilt screams "amateur"! Nonetheless, I'm fairly pleased with the end result, plus.....I'm glad it's done! Whew!

This isn't the best picture for detail, but in the large purple borders, my quilting pattern is a picket fence. It turned out pretty cute. The majority of the rest of the quilting was simply stitch in the ditch. With blocks so tiny (3"), quilting in the ditch seemed to be a good choice as most other patterns would just get lost. The purple borders were my only large areas to highlight quilting, and I took advantage of those open spaces.