One Christmas Gift Finished

It's been over a week since I posted anything, and what a busy week it's been.  I've traveled 1500 miles to move a daughter back home from college at the end of her semester, gotten news that my Grandmother passed away (funeral to be after Christmas, so another out of state road trip coming up), finished purchasing the presents that couldn't be homemade, bought a dress to wear to Grandma's funeral ($16.50 at a consignment store and it looks awesome!!  Frugalista very happy), and finished the largest of my homemade Christmas gifts.  Now to whip off the six smaller ones in the next 54 hours!

The largest one is a lap quilt I made for a special friend of the family.  Other than not being married in, he is family.  My kids all consider him a grandpa.

I made twelve sawtooth square blocks, in two different color schemes.

The center squares of each--the deer and John Deere fabric--might look familiar.  I used both of those fabrics in the redneck baby quilt I made in April for K3.  At the time I made that quilt, DH suggested that for Christmas, I make the almost-family-member a lap quilt with those two fabrics.  The person in question is an old farmer, and a long time hunter.  So I filed that in my to-do folder for fall.

Once I had six quilt blocks made in each of the two color schemes, I added sashing to them.

Once they were all sashed, I sewed them into four rows of three blocks each, alternating the blocks in each row.

Then I added a border, and made the quilt sandwich (three times.  *sigh*  by this time I'd gotten news that my Grandma was failing and I just could not concentrate on much of anything.  I thought I was concentrating, but after sandwiching the quilt wrong, stitching it, picking all the stitches back out, relayering, resewing, again finding out it was wrong. . . I guess I really wasn't doing as well mentally as I thought I was.)

When I finally got the layers right, I turned the quilt right side out (I 'birthed' it rather than going with a binded edge) and stitched in the ditch for the quilting.  The finished product is shown in the picture below.  For some reason, the colors in the photo are kind of washed out looking.  The individual block pictures above are more true to color.

For the backing, I went with a brown plaid, that just jumped of the shelf at the fabric store, calling the almost-family-member's name it so fits his personality.  Everyone who has seen the quilt so far agrees that it is most definitely the right fabric choice for him.

So, that is part of why I haven't blogged lately.  The other part involves an eleven hour brown out that fried the damper solenoid on our outdoor wood burner.  But that's another story for another day.