A Finish! Whoo Hoo!

After days and days of quilting, the White Trees quilt is finally finished! I am so happy about that!

It measures 58 x 74 inches, which makes it the largest quilt I've ever free motion quilted on my domestic machine...or any other machine, for that matter. It's also probably the most densely quilted of any other quilt I've done with the possible exception of some of my doll quilts.

I wish I had some better pictures to show you. It's pretty darned hard to photograph white thread on white fabric, but I've given it my best shot. My "tree bark" attempt in the gray border turned out okay, even though it isn't what I had planned originally. Certainly, if I had planned to do it this way, I would not have been able to.

Here's my feeble attempt to show you how the quilting looks from the back. The colors are a little off because I've worked with the contrast and brightness so that you can see the stitching.

Thanks very much to Debbie at Stitchin' Therapy who wrote the following comment in response to my thread breakage problems:

The Connecting threads thread is not strong enough for doing free motion when you are doing a pattern like swirls that changes direction often. Ask me how I know :) It may work fine for some fmq but swirls will give you endless headaches with it...even with a looser tension and larger needle. I use Isacord thread or aurifil thread for fmq now.

I had already figured out that a different thread was in my future, but sadly, I thought I might be stuck with what I had for now. Aurifil is recommended for my machine, and I will use that for any free motion quilting in the future. I didn't have any white Aurifil, but I did have a couple of spools of YLI Machine Quilting thread and I switched that out for the top thread. It worked sooooooo much better. I won that thread in a giveaway a while back. I'd still like the give the Aurifil a try next time around, however.

Interestingly, the closer I came to finishing, the more thread breakage I experienced despite the thread change. Could be I was just trying to go faster, or my arms and shoulders were tired, or something else completely. I tried slowing down and making those direction changes less abruptly, and then the problem went away. Could also have been a weak spot in the thread. Who knows the mysterious ways of the sewing machine?

So last night I started hand-stitching the binding and I'm already one-third of the way around it. And there are still 7 days left in the month to work on some of the blocks on my to-do list! Yahoo! Also, I need to work on my NewFO project for October. A quilter's work is never done.

So whadda ya' say...

And don't forget! The Blogger's Quilt Festival Starts today! 

I've entered my quilt, A Day in the Life of Mr. Bear, in the Baby Quilts category, but if you click on that button above, it'll take you to all of the show categories.
I woke up very early this morning, and then couldn't get back to sleep. Maybe I was thinking about all the housework I've neglected this week while working on my quilt. Frankly, I'm looking forward to taking a day off from the sewing machine, cleaning up the piles of scraps and other flotsam I left lying around in my sewing room, and doing some other houseworky things. Tomorrow, in our ongoing quest to find a camper for our truck, we are driving up to Tacoma to take a look at one that we hope will meet our needs. Tacoma is about three hours north of Portland, and with a drive that long, you can bet there will be a quilt shop in the mix somewhere.
So with all of that going on, I'm guessing I won't get back to the sewing machine before Sunday. Have a great Friday!