Plain Spoken

What started as my Tie One On apron is in the process of becoming a quilt for my yet to be born niece, Emerson Rose. This month the apron is to have a holiday theme. I thought of doing a Thanksgiving apron, even though I don’t cook much for Thanksgiving now because we always go to Charlie’s parents’ house and his mom does all the cooking – except she doesn’t make cranberry sauce!

Cranberry sauce is my favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner. I make it from the recipe on the back of the bag of Ocean Spray cranberries which basicallly involves putting whole cranberries with slices of oranges (peel and all) and some sugar into the food processor. The resulting sauce is really tart and wonderful! So I make the cranberry sauce and I think I eat most of it, too, (how can a whole family not like cranberry sauce?).

Anyway, once I’d gathered all the cranberry fabrics (deep red being my favorite color), I was hunting around for a new patchwork pattern to try. Looking through The Modern Quilt Workshop, I picked Plain Spoken mostly because it has a nice abstract look to it and because it was rated as easy on their difficulty scale.

As I was cutting I realized that I would probably have enough squares to make what they label as a wall hanging but to me seems a good size for a baby quilt. I considered making it for Baby Glassenberg II, but it just seemed to look so Emerson Rose to me (my brother and his wife announced the name a while ago).

It is all pieced now and I’m so pleased with it. I think it will look really nice in a girl’s nursery. Now I need to figure out how I’m going to quilt it. I’m tempted to just tie it because it is easy and I won’t risk messing it up, but the authors of the book recommend against tying. Any suggestions on a relatively safe and easy alternative? Something that doesn’t require dropping the feed dogs?