Project Update: 10.03.2026

Hello Friends and Welcome!

I'm excited to be starting off this week's post with an announcement; we've bought a new house!

It's got almost an acre of land, which will be great for Meara, and is a bungalow, so hopefully that will help with my habit of falling down stairs! The house was built in the 1960s, so it's a lot newer than our current home, but needs some renovations and updates, which gives us the chance to make it suit our needs exactly!

We actually bought it a few weeks ago, but I waited to announce it here on the blog until I'd had time to tell my Grandma in person first, which means that we are actually getting pretty close to the closing date now!

Our current home closes on 20 March, so we will be moving out this coming weekend and using the following week to do some final tidying for the new owners. Our new house closes on 27 March, and we will be moving in within a few days of closing, so we'll be living with family for two weeks while we're between houses!

What that means for the Fibre Arts blog is that I won't be sharing a post next week, as I'm expecting to be busy, and though I hope to share something the following week, if all my projects are packed up, I may not have anything to talk about. But I will be back to posting on 31 March, and the next Midnight Circus update will be posted on 07 April as scheduled!

In the meantime, let's take a look at the current state of my ongoing projects!

Midnight Circus Sample Quilt

I said ongoing projects, but it's more like ongoing project since I've already packed away a lot of my quilts in preparation for the move, but I have continued quilting and piecing my Midnight Circus sample quilt!

Though most of my progress was made in the background quilting, the most noticeable change in my quilt is the addition of more rows of blocks, and even a few borders!

I was really excited to add my third corner to the quilt top, since it really helps to define the shape of the finished quilt!

I also measured out a perimeter around the edge of my new corner that was about an inch wider than I planned to make my borders, and trimmed away the excess batting and fabric.

Once that was done, I added border strips to the two full length sides of my quilt!

The borders were super fast and easy to piece onto the quilt centre, and I was excited to jump into quilting them right away!

I continued the uneven matchstick quilting from the background areas of the quilt centre across the width of the borders, which added some really great texture and helps the pieced accents to stand out!

Adding the borders also meant I could quilt my sashing stars all the way to the edge of the quilt, finishing those motifs too!

I love the mix of dense and more open quilting that the lotus motif creates! I should defiantly use this on more of my quilts in the future!

You can also see one of the reddish squares right near the edge (bottom centre of photo) doesn't have any quilting yet, and I am planning to quilt the lotus in those too, but I wanted to add another row of blocks to my quilt top before the guild meeting at the beginning of the month, so I switched back to piecing for a bit!

Adding the row containing my final Star block to the upper left corner of the quilt has made a huge difference in the way it looks! The final shape and pieced design are much more defined now, and it almost looks like a finished quilt!

I even added a little background quilting to the sashing the new row was stitched onto!

And a little update to the quilting progress diagram!

On the left is the progress from last update, and the right is the current state of the quilt!

Now that I can see my progress a little more clearly, I think I'd like to get the quilting along my first two borders finished up before moving on to quilting the new row. It very much feels that my border quilting was interrupted half way through and I'd like to remedy that!

And since this is a quilt as you go project, here's an updated look at the patchwork backing!

It's nice to see some new prints added into the mix!

Midnight Circus is my own original design, by Valerie Anne of the Fibre Arts blog, and is currently running as a free quilt along.

Friends, I have been having so much fun working through the quilting on my Midnight Circus sample quilt! Three weeks of stitching has made a lot of progress!

And though I don't know how much stitching I'll have time for in the coming weeks, I'll do my best to continue sharing updates on Instagram while I'm away from the blog, and I hope you'll continue to support me!

I'd also love an update on your projects! Please share your stories and photos in the comments below, or reach out to me in an email! With everything going on right now, I may take a little longer than usual to respond, but I'll do my best!

I'm looking forward to a new update in a few weeks!

Until Next Time Friends, Keep Creating!

~VA