Quilted Symphony update,

Happy first day of Spring!   NOT!

What we woke up to today!

I just about fell out of my chair when I saw that more than a month had passed since my last post!   

In between getting some house repairs, moving furniture, cleaning and such, I've been busy, honest!

I was going to wait till it was finished, but I can't wait.  This is my quilted symphony to date.  I just finished working on it about an hour or so ago.

I have it all quilted and ready to have the border sewn on.  I won't show you the borders colours I finally chose, but that was way more work than I thought it would be.  In the end, I took my camera and all the fabrics I thought might work in the border and just set them all up, one by one, and took photos of them.  All you need to photograph is the wall hanging, as above, and then various borders placed on one side.

I have no idea how many combinations I came up with, but I took photographs of them all.  I then downloaded them onto my laptop and rather than chose what I liked the best, it was easier to start eliminating what I didn't like.  When I was down to three close contenders and found it hard to chose, I printed them off.  It was really easy at this point, to lay out the three fabric patterns in person again, and from those three, I chose one I liked the best.    I really thought I would have the dark brown as the outer border, but it just didn't look right in any of the fabric combinations.  Hopefully, I will have the borders done in a day or two so you can see it done.

Quilting was a real challenge for me.  I confess I have hand quilted but have not done very much machine quilting.  I have done even less free motion quilting, and if you've been keeping up with the blog, you know I really suck at free motion quilting.  So, just about all the quilting was done by machine using a walking foot.  That meant that for the little circles, I had to take a stitch or two, stop, lift up the foot, turn the fabric slightly, take another stitch or two, lift up the foot, turn fabric, and on and on, till done.  

This is a close up of some of the quilting.

I did try my hand at free motion quilting, when doing large circles in blue.  They turned out so uneven, in both the smoothness of the circle, and the length of the stitches that I went back to using my walking foot.  Check out the inside blue circles.  

I was trying to use what I had instead of buying something, so for this piece, as batting, I used the first thing I came across which was bamboo batting.  Lovely stuff, horrible for this project.  Wow.  Do I have ALOT of fluff to get rid of.  

I picked one fabric for the back, and you can see some of the quilting come through in the next photo.

I've got umpteen different things to show you but will keep this somewhat short since I haven't been on in a while.

Always time for photos though!

We had a wonderfully deep hoar frost a week or two ago.  It left the most amazing white world.  I had to take a walk along a nearby river and took only about 400 photographs.  I will only show you a few, I promise!

and by the river

and again

One last one that is just too pretty.....

Okay, I lied.  This is the last one!

Someone told me blog readers like small pixel size photos better as they load up faster but in looking at the blog before posting, the photos of the quilt are a bit small or fuzzy. I did leave the frost photos in larger format.   I'm not sure what to do now.  Maybe you can let me know which you prefer?

Some interesting goings on in the next week.

If you live near Moncton, New Brunswick, Heidi at London Wul is hosting a needle felting class this saturday called "Felted Sculpture- Wire Structure". 

Monday and Tuesday of next week, Quilting B and More in Charlottetown is hosting a workshop on "Painting with Thread". 

Both sound exciting!

As I drink coffee # 9 for today, storm or no storm, I think I better go for a walk to shake off some of this energy!

Have a super day!