Just in time for cool weather

Autumn Moons is finished, just in time for cooler fall evenings.  It has already been curl-up-on-the-couch tested by both kids and declared cozy.

 

As you can see I had trouble picking a picture…

All the quilting was done with a walking foot, taking the curves slowly, figuring out where to start each curve to minimize the amount of quilt that would need to be pushed around through the throat of the machine as I turned the fabric under the foot.

For the quilting in the leaves I tried a curvy leaf shape inside one pieced leaf but wasn’t sure I liked it.  In the next leaf I tried just straight lines from each point to the stem.  That was OK, but still not quite right.  In the third leaf I did both.  That was a winner so I went back and added the missing parts to the previous two leaves.

The unquilted tops list is now officially a shortlist of two!  Well, two plus the 3/4 quilted Canada Quilt in progress, but as it had lots of quilting on it by now I don’t think it belongs on the unquilted list anymore.  Unfinished, but not unquilted!

Now I need to decide which top to quilt next:  Seeing Stars or Quilter’s Scrapbook.  I’m toying with the idea of hand quilting one, but maybe I need to finish hand quilting the Canada Quilt before I decide.  I know I need to get started on a bed quilt for my son as well (his current one has started shredding) and I’d like to hand quilt that, so maybe I should just machine quilt both current tops.  Decisions, decisions.  Plus there’s a ridiculous part of me that thinks maybe I should set myself the challenge of taking all my quilts to the finished stage before I cut into fabric to start a new one.  If I do that will I lose my quilting license?

Update: The pattern for Autumn Moons is now available in my shop!

Slow Sunday Stitching

Today I am linking up with Slow Sunday Stitching over at Kathy’s Quilts.  There are lovely hand stitching projects there every week and it’s nice to know I have company in the slow stitching department.

I’m still plugging away at hand quilting my Canada quilt, picking up momentum as it gets closer to completion.  There’s nothing like seeing the end in sight to motivate me!  I think the quilting is about 3/4 done, and all the bits for which choosing a quilting motif was challenging are finished.

These are not the true colours.  They are really much brighter, but adding light or using the camera’s flash washes out the quilting.  It’s just not a good time of day to take pictures of quilting details!

Looking at this now, I wish I had left some unquilted space behind the letters. The letters seem to have lost definition.  I may go back and redo this, or I may not.  I have already rethought, unpicked and redone a few other parts of the quilt and I’m not sure I have enough enthusiasm left to do that again!  Perhaps once I’ve finished everything I can reconsider and decide if this little bit bothers me enough to redo.

Tonight I’m working on the last corner of the quilt center.  Next up will be the trees and the last 5 log cabins in the pieced border, and finally the plain outer border.

Walking foot quilting again

I am determined to whittle down the list of flimsies waiting to be quilted.  I know my pile isn’t as high as some others’, but I really start to spin my wheels and be very unproductive when I have too many unfinished projects in my sewing nook.  I just don’t know where to start and feel guilty working on new ideas.

So, in the last couple of weeks I pieced a quilt back and basted and started machine quilting last fall’s autumn themed quilt. (Last fall’s flimsy.  Do you see the inertia a project acquires once it becomes a complete but unquilted top?)

This one measures about 48” x 60”, not a bad size to manage on my machine.  These days I am drawn to the crispness of straight lines so Walking Foot and I are continuing to work on our partnership.  We’re stretching a bit to include arcs.  I know the accepted wisdom is to use free-motion quilting for curves, but I know my current free-motion limits!  I want crisp arcs in those circles, and my free motion skills won’t give me those so I’m turning the fabric under the walking foot.  I don’t know that I would do it if this was a larger quilt to wrestle with, but it’s working well enough for this one.

So far I have quilted all the straight lines in the background as well as quilted in the ditch around the maple leaves and circles.  It doesn’t show up well in this picture but each quarter of the circle has a different set of concentric curves quilted in it.  There are only 33 more quarter circles to go!  And the border… 

I am enjoying the luxury of leaving this project out and working on it a little bit at a time as I feel like it  With my new-to-me work table, I don’t feel the urgency to get it done quickly to unclutter the dining area upstairs like I did when I had to do the quilting on the kitchen table.  I wonder if feeling like I needed to clear a long uninterrupted stretch of days to get a quilt quilted in one big push contributed to  me dragging my feet about getting around to the actual quilting?