A legit Friday finish, just in time!

Untitled, a photo by Sew Festive on Flickr.

Whew, I sewed all day so that I can get my package out to my Savvy Seasons partner tomorrow. I'll show the rest of the package another day, but this is the main event.

It started as a drawing with my favorite [right now, at least] Farmer's Wife block, #18, Century of Progress. It then progressed to over 200 pieces that were traced out and cut out with scissors.

I chain pieced my heart out.

I went back and forth on how to press my seams. From past experience with this block [where I pressed my seams open, as I typically do] I had so much bulk in the center. So I started pressing to one side. But that wasn't working either. You can see the differences in pressing really well from the back. 

I had some piecing issues, so some of the blocks in this pillow were sewn 3 times. My template-tracing and scissor-cutting were not precise, and precision is key when you have 200+ pieces. I ended up having to pin the heck out of the triangles when sewing together, and as you can see, my points are still not perfect where the diamonds meet. Next time!

When it came to the quilting, I would have liked some time to mull over what to do, but time was not a luxury I had, and so I decided on some tiny stippling in the white sections. I don't know about you guys but I found that when I was doing tiny stippling I also ended up making my stitches tiny. It was impossible for me to lengthen my stitches while still keeping my loops small. Funny how the brain works, huh?

Oh, and then this happened:

Yeah, I have no clue what happened. All of a sudden I had a bent needle. Thank goodness I had just bought a package of needles.And thank goodness it just bent, and didn't break off!

So here we have it! A completed 18" pillow.

I love it in all its imperfections. I love that I would have never made this for myself, but am always pushed to do complex things for other people in swaps. And I love that I finished at 730 pm, in the dark, and had to take a picture in my bathroom in front of my shower because it gets the best nighttime light in that room.

Go check out all the other Friday finishes! I think those are the best kind of finishes, because it means sewing time during the week, and I always need some "me" time during the mad rush of the week.

***Does anyone know how to keep photos from publishing on Blogger if I upload them from Flickr to Blogger on my phone? Is there any way to upload them to a post that's a draft? And to upload them all to the same post? See, the Internet isn't easy for us young folks either!