Mrs. Lebo's Legacy V

Still at work on the applique for these checkered Dresden plate blocks.  Here's what I have so far (in fast photos because I have too much to do before bedtime and too little time to do it). I also don't have a handy place to take good photos, so I'll do that later, but these show the variety of wedges created from one 42 strip jelly roll of American Jane's Bread 'n' Butter and four additional strips of fabric.

The seventh of nine blocks is about half done and under the needle of my treadled Necchi.

I'm using a 2 mm stitch length with a 1 mm zigzag. This experience really has me wishing for a hand crank machine that does zigzag, but I'm not at all sure such a machine exists. I think by the time Singer had built in zigzag the machines could no longer be converted to hand crank. One lesson learned: assemble the wedges, glue baste the center circle (I used Elmer's water soluble school glue--dot, dot, not a lot), pin to background square (heavily spray starched square); applique center first, and fine tune pinning of wedges and then applique them.  That works much, much better than appliqueing center to the Dresden plate before placing it on the background.

I promise to shoot better photos in better lighting later. I'm feeling a little shaky because right now our winds are 39 mph at 49 degrees with intermittent precipitation and all this noisy weather  makes me more than a bit discombobulated! The wind speed is predicted to drop after midnight.  I certainly hope it does! I'd fall asleep to music, but if I do, it's likely I won't wake up when my radio alarm goes off at five in the morning.

Happy quiltmaking,....