Quick little finish

Hi everyone!  How was your week?  This was the last week of class--yay!  And not all my classes have finals, so we're just about at the end.  Then I plan to sleep for at least a week.

You know how sometimes you just *need* to finish something?  You don't want to make progress on something, you want to actually finish something?  That's how I felt this week, so I pulled a small quilt that needed to be quilted out of the closet and stuck it under the needle.  Here's how it turned out:

It's about 38 by 38, which makes it a small baby size, but I think it would look great on a spring table, don't you? It was a really cloudy day and I couldn't get the best picture of the colors, but the sashing and binding are both a lovely aqua color. 

I made this little top a couple of years ago from the blocks I made for a failed project.  The quilt shop that I used to live near (and I still love!) ran a year-long project making the Loyal Union Sampler by Jennifer Chiaverini.  These blocks were as far as I got.  They were lovely, but the project as a whole just never really excited me.

So when I needed a finish this week, this little top was just hanging there, waiting.  This is as good an argument as any I've ever heard for keeping some UFOs handy, too.  I quilted it in a free hand cross hatch, by which I mean that I didn't use a walking foot, just the free motion foot for the machine.  The rows are pretty straight but got wobbly in a couple of places.  Oh, well!  The overall effect is pretty nice, and doing the quilting itself was pretty soothing, almost like meditation. 

So that was my finish for the week!  It felt pretty good to sew, and it felt great to finish this.  And I'm feeling a lot more relaxed now, too. Don't know what I'm going to do with this little quilt, but I'm putting it in the win column! 

Last week I heard from a lot of azalea lovers!  I promise that we are keeping at least a couple of them.  Here's another lovely shrub growing in our garden:

I don't know what this is, but it's pretty!   It has also been chopped up, but it looks like it's coming back pretty well already.  And who can resist those lovely flowers?  You should see the size of the honey bees hanging out around those flowers!

Hope everyone has a great weekend!  It's going to rain like crazy all weekend, so I expect to make a lot of progress on a lot of things.  I'll probably just end up taking a nap or baking something, though.  I'll let you know!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, and crazymomquilts.