Range Riders Quilt Top Done!

January used to be the slowest month when I was growing up. It was always so cold and it was dark early, so we stayed inside a lot. I always looked forward to February... Stock Show and my birthday! Now that I'm an adult, January just seems to fly by. I can't believe there are only 2 weeks left. I've been busy teaching quilting and sewing classes this month, so that's one reason it's flying by so quickly. Saturday I taught Janome Basics. It went pretty well and the ladies all seemed to learn a lot. Tonight I'm teaching Janome Memory Basics, Tues. night is Fast & Furious Baby Quilt, and Wed. night is Professional Tote, so it's going to be another busy week, but I love teaching quilting classes.
I've been working on the Range Riders quilt since the beginning of the month. I had all the applique traced and cut out and all the backgrounds cut out, but I knew it was going to take me a long time to do the applique stitching. Friday night I pieced all the flying geese. Sat. morning I got up and worked on the appliqued stars and after class I started putting the blocks together. After 7 hours on Sat. I had 5 blocks done.

I worked on more stars before church and then put the blocks together when I got home. By noon I had all 10 of the picture blocks done.

All afternoon I worked on the applique on the boots. I satin stitched the soles and heels of the boots black and then accented the tops with blue, maroon, or brown. By 3:30 I finally had all the boot blocks appliqued and I took a much needed break! I made homemade chicken noodle soup for supper and then let it simmer while I tore all the totally stable off the boots.

Sunday evening I put the quilt together. It actually went together pretty quickly and I only had a few seams I redid, just to make my points perfect. I changed the quarter inch on my machine and it made all the difference in the world with how my blocks were lining up. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. By 8PM I was done with the center and started putting the mitered borders on.

When 10PM rolled around I was just doing the final pressing on it. It's done and ready to go to the quilter today! It's a store sample and another lady is quilting it, so I don't have to, which leaves me time to finish up my last goal for the month and start working on my snowball I Spy quilt. I was really hoping to start it last night, but I made myself finish this one first, so now I can do some playing. I also got some new material for project bags I want to start working on. So many projects, so little time!
The finished quilt has mitered borders which went on surprisingly easy.