I finished my first quilt! It's a little 26" by 26" project. I don't have a camera, but you can see it on the cover of this book, at the bottom right, the black-and-red one:
The only thing I regret about this project is using a yellow pencil on the gray area to mark a circle around the center square. I had tried the yellow pencil on other fabrics and it came out fine, but I didn't try it on this fabric, and the yellow seems to be there to stay. The yellow is very faint and nobody can see it but me, but still . . . . I have tried a soft toothbrush and mild dish detergent on it without any success, based on research (which also revealed that a lot of yellow pencils have nearly indelible sulfur in them). I'm accepting suggestions. Lesson learned: try all marking tools on a scrap of every fabric I use before I use them to mark quilting designs.
I also forgot to wash my fabric before starting to cut, but the piece came through a cold-water hand-wash just fine.
Incidentally, I really love this book and am going to start on another project from it (the "Pembrokeshire") ASAP. This red-and-black piece I just finished is perfect as an antimacassar over a black chair-back in my living room (I'm cross-stitching a red-and-black, Southwestern design for a pillow to set on the chair, under the quilt.) The Pembrokeshire will be perfect as a wall hanging in my bedroom.
I still have the fully-pieced, queen-size taffeta quilt top waiting until I'm confident enough to quilt it. I'm also cutting a queen-size linen-and-cotton project, and I think I'll finish the latter first, to practice before I resume work on the taffeta. (I'm moving slowly on my quilting and quickly on my cross-stitch at the moment.)
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