Creation before Consumption

This title came from a post by Cheryl Arkinson ("Sunday Morning Quilts:...", "A Month of Sundays:...") that really spoke to me. Lately, after my first-thing-in-the-morning routine of 1st cuppa/blood pressure reading/word puzzle (while I 'rest' for 10 minutes before taking my BP reading), I've been going into my studio and doing some stitching on the Gift Quilt while my eyes are still fresh. Not catching up on emails, not checking the other bloggers I follow, not poking my head into Twitter nor ebay nor NPR. Just putting in some quality time on my Viking until my eyes get too tired.

And here are the results, so far:

A better view of all the echo stitching in the middle:

You can see lots of threads hanging about. I would never have thought that burying threads would ever become a treat, but that's exactly how I was thinking of them as I worked on this today: "Finish quilting this last corner, then you can relax with a fresh cup of coffee!" And "relax" meant unclenching the toes on my left foot, extracting my shoulders from my ears, breathing again, and holding the top at a distance easily dealt with given my compromised vision at the moment.

I've been closely outlining the embroidery in the outer corners for the past several days, and today I 'inlined' (?) the larger segments too, nine in each corner. That makes 72 pairs of threads to knot and bury.

Previously I'd been diligent in my intent to bury threads as soon as I could after starting or stopping a line of quilting, but I've come to realize that thread burying is even harder on my eyes than quilting! So for this stage of quilting I let all the ends hang and accumulate, knowing they'd be easy to find later. I didn't want to waste my fresh vision on this part of the process while there was still quilting to do.

And now to bury some threads!