Happily Ever After - Quilting

I was beginning to think I was going to make it through the whole month without making much progress on my major goal - quilting the Happily Ever After quilt.

After another hour of steam iron basting - this time with an extension cord, which helped - I figured it was as good as it was going to get on that front.

I had my husband help carry the sewing machine desk into the newly cleared living room, tuned in to a tv marathon of detective/cop shows, and went at it.

In the first hour, I managed four lines of quilting. That was discouraging - if I followed my plan, at that speed it would take me 16-17 more hours of work to complete the quilting. Needless to say, I began reevaluating immediately.

Straight line quilting (or something approaching straight lines, because these are more organic than ruler straight) is not my favorite thing to do. On small projects, it isn't so bad, but it's not what I'd call fun. So, after five hours when I had the opportunity to work in the other direction, I decided to cut from three straight-ish lines in the colorful fabric to one.

Considering it was approaching midnight, that's the best picture I could get.

So it's done. Ish.

What I really want to do is add some accent stitching around some of the wonky stars - either by machine or hand. Doing that kind of thing by machine is a lot more fun than lines, but dragging this huge quilt around and through the machine is not easy - my shoulder still aches from the effort the straight lines required so I'm a little scared to do anything more intense. Hand quilting it would cut down on that kind of effort but I'm not sure I want to showcase my hand skills...

And so, I may just call it done and move on to the binding aspect - which needs to happen relatively quickly before we get sick of the sewing machine in the living room and the living room in the kitchen. May I never again attempt a quilt too big to work in my usual space!