Quilting on a Cloudy Day

The kitties enjoyed a day without sunshine yesterday. They each have dark fur, and they get too hot in the sun. The clouds were a welcome relief for them, and they played outside together for a long time. Like I've said before, these two are thick as thieves.

After catching up on some housework, I got to work quilting the last six blocks of the Bee Loving quilt. This one is "Bee Courteous."

"Bee Fruitful."

"Bee Romantic."

This next one is "Bee Sunny." For this one I followed the motif I'd been using, but also quilted some rays around the sun.

This next one is "Bee Grateful."

The last one is "Bee Simple."

From there, I quilted honeycomb hexagons into the pieced sashings. I thought these might take a long time because I expected to have to mark them to keep them even. As it turns out, they were easy enough to do free-hand, and so they went pretty quickly.

Here's how it looks from the back. I was able to make this a continuous line design by quilting just one side at a time. The adjacent sections in the middle had to be stitched back and forth to bring the stitching back to the beginning, but that was simple enough.

When the sashings were all quilted, I pulled the quilt off the machine and laid it out in front of our living room window. It's terrible lighting for displaying the quilt, but it gives good contrast so that you can see the quilting. Here's how it looks so far.

And here's how it's looking from the back.

Now, I just have the two borders to quilt. For the inner border in honeycomb fabric, I'm borrowing another design from Lori Kennedy. She calls her design "Spiral Hearts." I didn't practice mine quite the way she did it, but I like this just fine.

Again, it's done first one half, then the other, then echos are stitched around the hearts. I'll need to mark the center line, but otherwise, I think I can keep the hearts uniform enough in size without any other markings. Before committing it to the quilt, I'll want to practice a few more rows.

That's where I'll pick it up today. I have another idea for the outer border, but let's just see how far I get with this today. It's good to have it this far along. This is my August OMG project. At the beginning of the month, there was little hope of finishing this during the month of August, but I'm beginning to feel more optimistic.