I may have mentioned that I haven’t been able to do as much sewing as I would like. I don’t like to sew at night, so I do a fair bit of it during the day, around my day job (which is project- and team-based, so I often have an hour of work to do, then an hour of waiting for someone to do their part, then another hour of work…) I mostly piece blocks during the week, as they are easy to slip in between work sessions.

Sewing all those blocks together takes more time, so I save that for my weekends. It usually takes all (if not more) of one afternoon to sew blocks into a top.

But work has been crazy busy, so there’s been little to no time for piecing. And my weekends have been unusually packed too… so no top assembly either. That is until this past weekend.

The blocks for my brother’s birthday quilt have been waiting since the end of September… it rarely takes me this long to get a top together. Obviously, Saturday I couldn’t do it because Mom and I were delivering all our quilts (I still can’t believe that happened!). But Sunday morning, I got up and got started on assembling them first thing:

And it was a good thing I started early – about 15 minutes after I shut the iron and sewing machine off, we lost power (crazy windstorm). It didn’t come back on until 4:30 Monday morning (14 hours without power).

But back to that quilt – isn’t it lovely? It’s all flannel… and let me just say, I’ve learned a thing or two about sewing with flannel. It definitely has more stretch than regular quilting cotton. I don’t think I’ll do a lot of intricate piecing with flannel again. And the dark colour really picks up every little bit of lint and fuzz. But it is oh so soft.

I love the secondary pattern the blocks created when they came together (you can see here, my piecing is a little wonky because of that extra stretch).

The plaid I used for the border will also be the backing. And I have just enough of the navy I used for the sashing to do the binding too. This one wrapped up like a perfect, flannelly present!

With any luck, I can get this quilted on the weekend and get another present marked off the list!