What started out in my mind as echo quilting on my "Contentment" quilt is really stippling, I guess. And the stippling sometimes feels crippling as the end of my thumb has gone from normal to calloused to cracked callous. OUCH! But I am making progress! I have completed 2 outer borders, 2 corners, and I am most of the way through my 3rd border.
What keeps me going? DVD movies and political intrigue on TV (the former being less disturbing than the latter). "Sully" (which is FABULOUS), "The Sound of Music," the second "Sex in the City" movie, "Bridget Jones' Diary" (oldie, but goodie), all the "Harry Potter" movies, "Beauty and the Beast"...I am enjoying going through my DVD shelves.
Every time I show a picture of my half quilting hoop I get a lot of inquiries about where I got it. It was many, many years ago (early 90's, I think). It has "Grace" stamped on the inside. I went to the Grace website and did not find it. I did some poking around on the Internet and found a company that sells something similar. It is Frank A. Edmunds & Co and they can be found here. I just ordered their smaller, 10-inch half hoop to try out. Their half hoops are deeper than mine and can do a wider border. I have been "whole-hooping" as much of the border as possible, then "half-hooping" the outer couple of inches. It was rainy today, so the light was bad to stretch it out on my bed to show progress...next time. In stitches, Teresa :o)
The hand quilting is progressing...hoop-full by hoop-full. I finally got around to cleaning up the scraps and snippets left over from basting the layers and realized I used a "Quilter's Dream Cotton - Select" batting remnant. I wanted the applique motifs to really "pop" prominently. (Jill, was it you who asked about the batt? It was not a "Warm and Natural" batting remnant, as I first believed.) I have got to start stapling a label on my batting remnants...
I really like hand quilting with a "Request" weight batt...it is easier to make finer stitches. But now that I am using this thicker weight batt I am having to just do the best I can. I have all the center squares and first stop border done, so now I am concentrating on the second and outer borders.
The center of the quilt (all blocks plus both skinny inner borders) is 1936 square inches to quilt. The outer border alone is 1428 square inches. I have learned not to get to excited about finishing the middle of a quilt because those outer borders encompass quite a bit of real estate themselves, LOL! Not as close to the finish line as one would hope...
I have got to go back and do a little more decorative fill quilting on the larger applique motifs. Even though the green blouse, below, is only about 2.5 x 3 inches, it looks a little wild and crazy without some tiny motif stitched in there. The background is so tight with the fill stitching...I don't like the overly puffy look of some of the larger applique pieces so I am trying to quilt them creatively. I like the surface of the quilt to be fairly uniform.
This is what I woke up to on Sunday morning. I know some of you are getting much worse right now, but this is definitely weird for Alabama in mid March. It was so weird to see the blooming daffodil clumps sticking out of the snow. We may get some more this week. My blueberry bushes were blooming last week. I hope the below freezing temps on Tuesday and Wednesday nights don't kill this year's berries!
Stay warm and stitch, all you snow birds! Teresa :o)
