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