Rounding the Corner and Heading Home

I finished quilting Delectable Pathways yesterday and did all the trimming. Then I made my double bias French binding, the best one I know for straight and true bindings, and prepped that for application today. I made it all the way around on the first go round, and about 1 1/2 sides on the finish go round so I have one corner done. When I first began quilting the instructions used to read something along the lines of "...quilt as desired and then bind as usual" which for someone who was entirely home schooled in quilting didn't provide much information. So initially I took the easiest route described in quilting magazines.

I either made straight binding, which I have to say never was satisfying or desirable, or I made the "quick" bias binding still recommended by multiple sources. That wasn't particularly satisfying or good but what did I know. After about 8 years of simply hating binding, hating what it looked like, hating how it was made, I decided to go to the trouble of cutting separate binding strips on a true bias, hand sewing those, and then hand sewing the binding to the quilt.

Guess what? My quilts hang true, my bias binding looks smooth, the entire process goes more smoothly and the results are significantly better. So tomorrow I will finish the binding and soak the quilt to remove the blue ink. Then I will block it and dry it. Then it will be ready for a photograph.

What won't be ready for a photograph is the current graph of Covid19 cases. 50,000 people in the last three days have been identified in three states as carrying the virus. Jerome Adams said on Friday that this was just the tip of the current iceberg in more ways than one. Not only will identified cases keep rising, but Adams says that the two week lag time between typical diagnosis and death mean that the mortality statistics of those 50K people won't show until mid-month.

Despite what Trump and minions keep saying, we are not only not done with this virus, we aren't even done with the first wave. All those people who were pointing fingers at the northeast US where the virus hit so hard (with the first cases coming from Europe not China), are beginning to understand what the impact is. It will only get worse from here.

Could we have ever contained it? Not with the current situation of people trusting their Twitter feed over their physicians.