A small fall project …

Here we are at Thanksgiving Eve. Although Thanksgiving week is one of my favorite times of the year, I think that this November has sped by much too quickly for me. Just the same, I am still enjoying the season and am looking forward to good food and a day full of family tomorrow.
This post will be brief and feature a small project that I completed a few weeks ago. The pattern is from Buttermilk Basin, and I purchased the kit from my local quilt shop, K & H Quilt Shoppe. 
This project is one that appealed to me for a number of reasons - the fall colors, the primitive style, wool appliqué and a chance to incorporate some hand quilting in the process. 
Here are a couple of "tools of the trade" related to hand quilting - a marking pen and a stencil. There are multiple types of marking tools out on the market - some are heat-soluble and some are water soluble. I don't know that one is necessarily better than the other. The main rule of thumb is to be consistent in your choice of tool within the same project. For example, with this project I used both dark and light marking pens, both of which were heat soluble. I used the dark pen on the light triangles and the light pen on the darker fabrics. 

These next pictures feature some completed hand quilting and a pattern that has been traced. The choice of thread color is really up to the individual quilter. I chose to use a light thread for both the dark and light triangles in the center of the project, and I chose a brown thread for the pattern on the edges. 

In the below picture on the left, you can see some of the stitching within the triangles as well as the traced pattern. I stitched over the white lines using brown threads. When I was finished, I ironed over the area; and the marking disappeared, leaving only the stitching (below right picture).

After the hand quilting was complete, I tacked down the mini-quilt. It features the churn dash block which is one of my favorite traditional block patterns. The next step was to appliqué the owl in the lower left corner of the project (see the very top picture). I then sewed on the binding and a hanging sleeve so that we could have this mini quilt hanging in our house for the Thanksgiving season.

As I said at the outset, this is a short post. I wish you all a very blessed Thanksgiving Day. I am going to close with these words from the psalmist:

O come, let us sing for joy to the LORD

Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation.

Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving

Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms

For the LORD is a great God

And a great King above all gods.

Psalm 95:1-3