All Quilting, All the Time

We had quite a storm blow through this past weekend. According to our local newspaper, there are some trees down and some associated power outages down in the valley. We, here on the hill, felt some pretty strong gusts of wind, but not even so much as a flicker of our lights. The power was on strong, and I don't think anything fell down. Always a good thing.

The sun came out Sunday evening, and I weathered the storm by quilting my guts out. I finished three more blocks and all the adjacent sashings. There are three blocks and three borders left. Oh yes, and I'll need to quilt all of the cornerstones. I won't get it finished today, and I probably won't finish it tomorrow. Wednesday is looking pretty promising. We shall see.

Here's what I did. By now, it should probably go without saying that I always quilt around the edges of all the applique. On this block, I gave the sun a big swirl, and I quilted a sort of square spiral on the cat. For the hill below him, I tried creating a motif I saw on Marcia's Crafting Sewing & Quilting Blog. Marcia calls this motif "Bubbles". I like it. It's a lot like pebbling, but you go around each circle twice. You can go around the outside or the inside of the circle, depending on how it fits your space. And you can change directions if you want to. It's a good motif, and I'll probably use it again. (Thanks for showing us your quilting, Marcia.)

Also, I stitched a trunk and some branches into the tree. I don't actually know if that's a tree. That's what I decided it was.

Next, I did the block below...oh such a familiar scene to me. For this one I used a motif I saw on Leah Day's blog. The motif in the orange background is one that Leah calls Wiggle, Wiggle, Spiral. It consists of two humps, as in stippling, followed by a spiral. That worked out pretty well, and it was simple to do.

In the area below the orange where the mouse door is, I simply followed the swirls in the print of the fabric. Then below that, I did another of Leah Day's designs. It's the one she calls "Cubing". It's really just pebbling, only done in squares instead of circles.

Finally, this one. I did a chevron motif in the green stripes below, and then just some wiggly lines in the picket fence. As usual, I've outlined all of the appliques.

By that time, I was pretty tired of quilting. I started around 10:00 a.m. and with just a few breaks, I quilted until 5:00. That's a lot of quilting, let me tell you.

So today, I'll be back at it. My quilt guild meets tonight. Our speaker is someone I've never heard of: Nancy Watts and her husband, John, will be speaking on the Mongolian Quilting Project. Nancy taught women in Mongolia to quilt to make an income. They used silk scraps from China to make quilted projects. It should be interesting. Just now I did an internet search trying to find more information about it, but it was hard to tell if I was looking at her work, or someone else's. I'll tell you more about it tomorrow.