Slow Quilting in My Down Time

It's been hectic. The usual mayhem and some extra stuff thrown in as well. So what else is new? I finally got one of my oldest unfinished quilts back from my friend--she of the new quilting longarm business. I asked her to leave the large flowers in the center alone as I wanted to add a little Perle Cotton stitching there. Funny me, I stitched in a dark brown color first, my usual go-to color, and then did some ripping out. Ughh. It needed a much lighter thread in order to keep that happy glow!

Ohio Memories quilt

And really, the stitching my friend did is wonderful. It didn't need anything added except that I wanted it. I'll show better pictures later when the quilt is totally finished. The thing is, my heart aches just a wee little bit because this would have been absolutely beautiful {in my eyes} if completely hand quilted. The texture my friends. It's all about the texture! ha! We all have our preferences don't we? And unfortunately there aren't enough hours in a day to hand quilt them all.

I'm also working on another quilt with a combination of machine and hand quilting. You know, because it was on my 2016 goal list! The machine quilting was done on my Bernina, stitch-in-the-ditch around the blocks and on both sides of the stripey border. Now I'm going back in and hand quilting inside the blocks and setting triangles. It's going so quickly and just making the quilt come alive for me. I keep getting a sort of Christmassy vibe from this quilt {must be the colors?} and so my hope is to finish this in time to use during the holidays.

At this point I'm seriously contemplating going back to the machine to quilt a cross-hatch design on the red border. It would be fast and probably look just as good as anything I hand quilted as the border fabric is very busy. That's my best gauge when I'm mixing combinations of machine and hand quilting in the same quilt. Will the hand stitching shine? Make the quilt look more special? If not, then I can skip it without remorse.

Red and Green and Baskets Quilt

All the hand quilting is done on the Pickle Dish quilt now. Sorry the picture doesn't show the texture on this one better. It's such a great quilt. Still can't believe I actually made this one! The binding is machine stitched to the quilt, just waiting for appropriate time to do the hand stitching and then, wallah! This one is going straight to my bed!

Pickle Dish

One of the things taking up chunks of my time lately is a 50th anniversary party for my parents. Scheduled to take place the Saturday after Thanksgiving, time has sort of slipped away as you can only imagine. All of the offspring are putting together 32" x 40" picture boards of our person and individual family which will then be arranged for display in birth order {there were 12 children born to my parents so quite the line-up}. There will also be another board specifically for my parents as well as other special pics of them, so that's more work too. Anyway, back to my point, in the center of these sibling boards we are requested to have a current 8x10" picture of ourselves.

So this weekend, my oldest daughter finally corralled my next oldest sister and me for our 'current' picture. Ugghh! Who wants to see that large a picture when we have the stereotypical, flabby, middle-aged body? I was instructed to take a quilt with me and my sister needed to take one of her dogs. Apparently this would help get us in the mood? and I hate to admit, something that probably worked exactly as planned.

A pic of me a few blocks from my house....

We didn't end up picking the above picture, but I just had to show you. Quilting doesn't do much for our thighs, but it really does enable some pretty awesome results otherwise. Now if the wind would just quit blowing for a minute, I might have been able to at least partially disguise the fact that I inhale entirely too much Pepsi and chocolate.....

Linking up with Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching. What a great post over there today!