All Ahead Slow

The coming several days will be taken up with slow-stitching. I'm very close to finishing off the Heartland Barns piece. This morning, I finished up the section I was working on.

And now I've hooped the last of it. There are 19 leaves to stitch, and then just a little more of the barn and the road. When that is finished, I'll have a finished set of quilt blocks to be sewn into a quilt top.

Yesterday, I finished off the quilting for Paintbox Pizzazz. I was still trying to decide how to quilt the two paint box borders when I left off on yesterday's blog. I ended up doing a little swoopy half-circle thing. When I'm doing a motif like this where there are a lot of changes of direction, I find it helpful to develop a little chant for myself that I can say out loud as I go. It keeps me heading in the right direction. The one for this motif was "Up-Over-Down-Back, Up-Over-Down-Back." There were three rows to complete the quilting, and so I might switch around the Up's and Down's depending on which direction I was headed. When it was finished, it looked like this.

Here's how it looks from the back.

When both borders were complete, I laid it out on the floor for a look. It's a big quilt at 71 x 71 inches, and so it's hard to get a good picture without a quilt holder-upper on hand. You can see there at the bottom left corner where I flipped up the back over the batting to use as a spot to check tension. 

Here's how it looks from the back. I'm pretty happy with this. Sometimes the quilting goes off without a hitch. The Superior Fantastico and Bottomline threads performed splendidly. 

Toward the end, I had a couple of top thread breakages. The last two quilts have taught me that when I'm quilting over a seam where many blocks come together (read that: a thick seam), the needle tends to dull over time. I switched out the needle when I started getting thread breakage, and that took care of it.

While I was hard at work quilting, the kitties were enjoying catio life. Sadie likes the catwalk that extends from the ladder to Smitty's corner office shelf.

Of course Smitty favors the corner office shelf. Something had his attention. There be squirrels here, and sometimes deer.

Okay, so I had some things to do around the house, but I had plenty of time left in the day to finish off the binding. The strips were already cut. In keeping with the "paint box" theme, I chose this one with paint spatters on it.

I always add an extra 20 inches of length to any binding I make to ensure I have enough to finish the whole distance. This one scared me a little. When I reached the point where I was ready to join the two ends, I had only this much left:

When the binding was finished, this was all that was cut off.

Have you ever worked with a quilt that resisted being finished? This was one of those. When it couldn't defeat me by having a too-short binding, it took a different tack. When I had just this much left to stitch:

I ran out of bobbin thread. Of course I did.

These were minor inconveniences...first word problems, you might say...and in the end, I prevailed. That binding is sewn on and ready for hand-stitching. Ta-Da!

So I don't know how much time I'll have for sewing today, if any. I'm heading down to Salem (about an hour south) to have lunch with my friend Lenelda and her mom. After that, we'll pay a visit to a quilt shop. On the way home, I'll need to make a stop at the grocery store to pick up some last minute items for the trip the guys are taking down to Monterey. And after all that, I expect to be exhausted. We'll see.