Pictures! Pictures!!

I finally got frustrated with waiting for DH's computer to be fixed so that I can add pictures.  We have it back but now have to wait until Feb 9th for the fellow to come out to the house to re-enter all of the programs that we're used to having.  (DH only uses the computer to play games,and claims to be unable to keyboard, but he managed to get his beloved Pokerstars.net up and running.  For everything else we have to wait.)  This old faithful computer has Photoshop Elements 7 (PSE) that I have fought with for many years.  iIhave taken many classes but have never really conquered the beast, so have never used it for pictures.  But today I downloaded pictures,using the program that came with the computer so many years ago..  Not sure if it will ever happen again. but we'll see.  I'm not sure where I left off with the pictures.  

 Below is the center panel of my charity quilt, which I have now decided is worth finishing as a single art quilt.  The picture shows it in the process of machine quilting.  I want the beautiful dyed fabric to be the focus of the piece, so the quilting has to remain quite subdued.I chose a neutral pale blue thread ( Guttermann 220).  this almost exactly matches the backing, and blends in to the dyed fabric quite nicely.  

This shows the three pieces of dyed fabric I made during my play day with friends Jan 17th, as well as the piece of plain yellow  to be used to finish the little drawstring bag I had planned.  All of this fabric is supposed to 100% cotton, and all the pieces went through the same dye bath.  It sure doesn't look that way.  While seen like this the top two appear to have sufficient variation of colour to work up into a nice checker board pattern, You can see from the second picture that they really didn't.

 Once it was all sewn together the result was dismal, and when I tried to shape it into a bag,it was even worse.  I didn't take pictures of the final result, just chucked it

Now we move onto the hexies.  After I had the piece to sized,and the edges inserted, I wanted to give it a good press. (The back especially really need it)  but I also wanted to make sure the seams were crisp, so I hauled out the spray starch.  I sprayed the starch into a palette, and used a brush to brush the liquid starch onto each seam,and them pressed each with my little Clover iron.  What a waste of time!  I got about 1/4 of the piece done and decided to just spray starch the whole thing and  give it a good press with my big steam iron.  It worked quite nicely. Thank you.

The hexies are now quilted. I started with marking out concentric circles using each corner as the center of my circles.  Yes this means that I marked from each corner, and many of the marks overlapped.  While I marked every 1/2 inch, I soon realized that quilting the lines a full inch apart was much more in balance with the size of the piece.  I will try to get a picture up, as soon as it is trimmed and ready for binding.