Quilting Progress

Did you wager on whether Mike and I would get out for a walk yesterday morning? We didn't. It looked like rain, and so we opted to stay home and do yard work instead. It was still good exercise, and I got the last of the weeding finished. Also, the catnip didn't come back from last year. I had some in a pot on the catio, and neither kitty cared much about it. I transplanted that into the Gracie Memorial Catnip Garden. Hopefully, it'll survive the insult to its root structure.

After that, I got back to quilting Snips and Snails. This one is going in small bites as I make decisions and then get comfortable with them. You might recall that I took the buttons off the Osh Kosh overalls I've been parting out for embellishments. I used some metallic thread to quilt some clasps below the straps of the overalls.

When this is finished, I'll use a hot glue gun to glue the buttons on. 

The right side was a little trickier. I was wishing there was a seam line there. As I'm looking at this, I'm thinking I'm going to stitch a line across the top of each clasp. That will finish it off a little better. As it is, the one on the right looks like it's floating in space.

From there, I switched off to a green variegated thread and stitched some wrinkles into the "blousy" part of the shirt at the bottom.

For the top of the shirt, my first thought was to stitch in some shoulder seams. They barely showed, and so I decided to stitch a diagonal grid in keeping with the plaid of the fabric.

There is pebbling in the shirt cuffs. It followed the design of the fabric too. 

As long as I had the green variegated thread on the machine, I decided to stitch the snake next. My first thought was to pebble in some scales. Then I looked at some images of snake skin. Their scales aren't round...rather, they're kind of like roofing shingles.

Also, I was remembering when I took the class. We first chose some different fabrics for the snake. They seemed perfect at the time.

But then Ann said they really looked more like a length of rope, and she was right. Consider the texture of nylon rope:

See what I mean? And so I had that in mind when I thought about quilting a lot of "roofing shingles" onto the snake and decided to go instead with closely spaced lines. They'll keep the eye moving up and down and not distract from the carefully placed dark green line down the snake's back.

Also, I left a space there for a hot fix nail head eye.

The last thing I did was to do some more "wrinkles" in the bandana.

My next stop is to quilt the arms and the face. 

I've been considering how to do that, and tried to find some examples of Ruth McDowell faces (the creator of this technique). Finding none, I wrote to Ann Shaw and asked for her suggestions. She sent me these two images.

I kind of like that. My friend Marei said that the lines suggest the "topography" of the face, which is a good word for it. Today I'll spend some time doing a couple of practice pieces and see how it looks. I might decide to round the corners instead of squaring them off.

 This morning I'm taking off bright and early to get my monthly pedicure...now about a month late. I need it badly. It's a CSA pick-up day. Aside from that, I'll be working on this quilt.