Progress Thursday.

Hi Everyone,

I know, I missed monday.   I was away for the long weekend, enjoying the last of the summer.  Therefore, there was no progress for a Progress Monday!

However, now I have finished the centre!

I am so glad I had already done the ditching Carla!  I thought of you as I got near the end and I realized I would struggle to ditch a quilt at the end, as once I can see the whole look of it, I would hate to go back and do some final hidden stitching!  So, I take my hat off to you.

The free motion quilting stage took me 22 and a 1/4 hours.   I am also on my 20th bobbin.  That is two pots of 9 and I’m on my third pot of pre wounds.  I wish I knew how to work out how much top thread I am using.

As much as I like using blue washaway pens to mark my quilts, I do find that they still leave blue marks behind.  I remove the marks as I go, but little bits remain!

 

So now, on to the border area.  I don’t want to feel that I end up rushing this bit, or that it feels like a bit of an after thought.  So I decided to include some ruler work in the first white border.  ( because of course, i have not yet done enough ruler work!)  I decided to use the same diamond stencil but only use half of it to create a border of triangles.  I worked my way in from both corners into the middle and then altered the layout slightly in the middle and at the corners.

 

I created an inner triangle also, initially with a plan to do some curved cross hatching in the centres.  Well that idea lasted all of two tiny very short attempts in a corner for me to realise that that wasn’t going to work! – both because of the look and more importantly because I had never done it before and it would be to hard to execute in that space for the first time.  Instead, I settled on a continuous line design that I had already used in the centre of my quilt.

 

The outside border I kept simple with swirls and this one was fun.  hard to believe, but this was the first time I had ever done an all over swirl on this amount of fabric!

In the triangle right in the centre, I decided to do some straight line quilting, to create a fan shape.  I hate it!

 

I stitched the lines a quarter of an inch apart and it is too much.  It is not perfect at the top where all the lines meet.  So for the bottom border I stitched them a half inch apart and this I like better!

 

Sadly though, I can already feel myself beginning to struggle.  I can now see the whole quilt and I have already started moving on in my head. I am already onto the next project ( my radiance quilt design!)  I know that I am going to feel again that feeling of completely finishing a quilt and just thinking ‘ okay.  Next!’

Does anyone else experience that feeling?  It is almost a bit sad.  I feel like I should feel elated and thrilled, but somehow, I end up feeling simply like I am ready to move on.  Somehow, in the process of working on all the skills I want to work on, I end up not feeling proud of those skills, but instead just accepting that I have gained them and now I want to gain something else!

I have now completed the top and bottom borders and so have taken the quilt off the frame in order to turn it to do the side borders.  Annoyingly though, now I cannot get the damn thing back onto the leader grips.  My hands seem to be refusing to produce enough strength to push the quilt onto the snapper poles ( can’t remember the name of them!)  So I have dumped it over my frame and left the room in a huff!  This is one of those times I need to go back to it at a later stage and begin afresh, either that or it will forever remain almost but not quite finished!

 

One more thing, before I leave this for today, Does anyone think I should do a light quilting design in the patchwork squares?  I am inclined to leave them, although originally I was going to quilt them.  let me know what you think? Love Suzy