some mountain quilting

Earlier last month, my 3 youngest daughters and I got to spend some time at our mountain cabin while everyone else stayed home and got started back into school. We got out of the extreme desert summer heat and into some wonderfully cool and beautiful country. I took 3 quilting projects along for the visit: my epp project, “Maude’s Chevron Peaks,” and “sugar sweet pinwheel” quilt. 

There’s a small sunroom at the front of the cabin that has large windows, a pair of rocking chairs, and a glorious view into the trees and over our neighbor’s ponds and meadow. This is where I usually sit to do my handstitching. It's such a contented spot for this sort of slow and meditative work.

My epp has been languishing away, untouched, for quite some time now, but I revived it earlier this summer while we were traveling through Alaska in an RV for two weeks. I got another wheel going while we were at the cabin. I always lay out the wheel and take a reference photograph before i start stitching it together, because no matter how hard I try to keep it in the right order, something always happens to jumble the pieces.

Maude just needed a foot or two of binding finished. Getting it complete was pretty exciting, but the view out the window that morning was pretty distracting in itself. Once it was complete, I photographed it on the cabin’s red railings, something I’ve always wanted to do with a quilt but never gotten around to before. Since red features heavily in several of my projects, I knew sooner or later I’d use it as a finish shoot location. I’ll post those photos soon.

It’s likely I could have completed the binding on this pinwheel quilt also, but I got pulled in the direction of epp instead. The pinwheel quilt has been at my dad’s house ever since my mom died this past March. I was working on it there as we waited out her last few days, and I left it there to work on whenever I visited my dad. He recently moved out of town, so I took the quilt back home with me. It’s covered in dog hair from his Pomeranian, which is the main reason I put it aside. It needs a good lint rolling first before I can get it completed.

I hung it out on one of the porch swings for an airing and to get a good look at the binding progress. It was a lot less than I thought. I almost always spread a quilt out on the floor when I want to check my binding progress. I feel like it’s the best way to see where I’ve gotten. Do you do that?
The quilt looks pretty at home at the cabin. I might be taking it up there to leave when it’s complete. Then again, I’ve considered giving it to my mom’s sister as a memory of the time we shared just before Mom passed. Undecided at this point.

Most of my epp work got done down by the river each day. The girls played in the water, trying to catch the newly stocked trout by hand, whilst I sat contentedly nearby and stitched, soaking in the mountain air and views. 

Maybe over Labor Day weekend I’ll get to go back up to the cabin for some more mountain freshness and stitching.