Autumn Colors Quilt!

A new project is under the needle of my sewing machine, getting quilted.  This morning I got Wonderful Husband to help me haul the Singer 15 table over by my sewing desk.  (I usually do it by myself, but he was home and I was feeling worn-down.)  I did a small project (more on that tomorrow), and determined that the machine probably needed cleaning and an oiling.  After taking care of that, I put on the free-motion foot and got to work!

Here's my setup:

I have the table that holds the 15, my go-to quilting machine, positioned in front of the table that holds the 401.  The increased table space holds the weight of the quilt as I work on it, which makes it sooo much easier than trying to do things any other way.  It's not perfect; I'd like to get risers of about three-quarters of an inch so the 15's table would be level with the 401's.  And the arm of the 15's table angles down slightly, so I want to eventually figure out an additional support for that at well.  But it works.

The Autumn Colors quilt that you can see waiting to be quilted started with a stack of 79 three and a half inch four-patches that came into my possession from I do not know where.  I made two more and set them nine-by-nine with alternating half-square triangles, making the stripes you see in the center.  I thought it was going to be a Christmas quilt, given all the red and green, but the beige paisley and brown dots fabric make it rather autumnal instead.

As of right now, I have five of those center nine rows quilted.  I know what I'm doing for the brown borders, but I need to consider what to quilt in the beige areas....

And relating to autumn color, on Saturday we had four groups of people look at our house.  When we got home, we found these on our front steps:

Chestnuts, maybe?  Were they left by a child, or a witch?  If the latter, are they a blessing or a curse?  Just in case, I've left them undisturbed. :)