A productive "happy housewife" day!

Three weeks ago (I think?), after the craziness of finals and the end of the semester, and before the craziness of teaching a three-week class started, I took a whole Saturday and played happy housewife.  First, I finished up a cover for the electric pancake griddle that Robert and I got as a wedding gift (Thanks, Julie!) I used the 12" Swoon block that I made several months ago, and a month or two ago I machine quilted it to a piece of scrap batting I had lying around.  I lined it with some plain light grey fabric I had leftover from the background of the arrow quilt I made for my grandcousin last fall - but I didn't have quite enough.  So I pieced in the last of the green fabric from the outside and a scrap of purple from Elise's quilt.

I'm very happy with it!  I got to practice machine quilting, and I made a cute cover to protect the griddle from dust while we're not using it - we don't have enough cabinet space, so we store pots and pans and things on an open bookshelf just outside the kitchen. 

The next thing I did that Saturday was quilt my jelly roll race quilt.  I decided to do one huge spiral, and at the beginning it was pretty tough to turn the quilt through the tiny throat space on my machine.  You can see in the photo above how tight the space was.  I could barely fit my hand in to guide the quilt!

I didn't mark the quilt top at all.  I used the quilting guide bar that fits into my walking foot, and checked that the distance was about two inches after every few spirals.  It turned out really well!

Here's a close-up of the back.  It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.  This is one of the worst "wobbles:"

Now I just need to make the binding, and the quilt will be finished!  It's definitely going to have to wait until I'm done teaching this class, though...