Slow and Steady

I'm definitely not winning any races with this approach, but things are getting done! 

Two weeks ago in my last post, I showed these columns, the medium lights and the darks sewn together.

Those were moved to a different location as the other half of the columns were created from the light and medium dark strings, filling the design wall once again.

And naturally from there everything got sewn together.

I'm not gonna lie--I wish I had oriented everything at 90 degrees from this, so the effect on its ultimate bed is less stair-step-looking. Live and learn!

Back in February I started quilting the final floral sandwich, discussed in this post. Here's how it looked back then.

I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to handle the light triangles, but I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to deal with everything else, starting with the center light frames in all the 36-patch blocks. They would get a line of stitching (using an off-white AURifil) through their diagonals, creating a diamond stitch line. There was no way to go from block to block without starting and stopping--the most tedious kind of quilting for me--so I made the project a little sweeter (literally) by rewarding myself with an M&M after each center diamond was stitched.

From there I started using up my nearly-empty cone of King Tut "Nefertiti", going through all the long diagonals of the 36-patches. This could be done with long stretches of stitching. After that, I started stitching through the shorter, 3-patch sections of those blocks, then stippling the floral diamonds, and proceeding to the next 36-patch. Very straightforward once I got the rhyme and reason worked out.

The butterfly fabric that backed a previous quilt showed up frequently in this top. Would you like to guess how many times I mistook the butterfly antennae for a piece of thread, and tried to pick it off?

I can tell you exactly how many: Every. Single. Time.

I eventually ran too low of Nefertiti and switched over to my nearly-empty King Tut cone of "Gemstones", finishing all the stippling with that. The remains of both cones were wound onto bobbins for my Brother QuiltPro--a most satisfactory way to use up every inch!

As of this writing I'm doing the final pass of quilting, back to using the off-white AURifil, running a line through the diagonals of the two corner light squares in each 36-patch and stippling in the adjacent triangle. I can get 4 triangles done before having to tie off and start someplace new, so it's not terribly tedious. Certainly not M&M tedious!

With an empty design wall beckoning, I pulled out one of the Size Reduction Treatment tops from last year. I had done some preliminary work to get it to a usable size, but didn't quite remember what I had done until I pinned everything to the design wall.

This is batik with a white-on-white background, scraps of which (the WoW) were also found in the Community First! Quilters' legacy stash. As each block is 12" finished, and there's an additional 2" (finished) white strip at the end of every row (alternating left or right ends) this top measures, at the moment, 62"x84". My plan is to unstitch the extra 8 blocks I removed from the main. You can see there are 4 rectangles (made up of 2 batik rectangles sewn to a white strip) surrounding the center white square. I'll maintain the integrity of those four sections and use them to border the main section.

I virtually played around with the idea this afternoon on the 'puter, wondering which would look better: batik as the outer edge, or the white strip? (Those things in the foreground are the light pull and some thin strips attached to the fan pull so I can grab it easily while I'm sitting.)
                            

It's subtle in these pictures, but I prefer having the dark batik as the final edge, using the white strip as the inner border so each block "floats". CF!Q are having our annual retreat next week, so this is the project I'll be bringing with. I've already pulled several pieces of batik for the backing, and am hoping this ends up being a rapid finish!