Hand quilting again

A couple of evenings ago I was moping around, feeling I would really like to have some handwork to do and wasn’t it too bad I actually had to make the binding for Clear Skies before I could sit quietly and hand stitch it to the quilt.  It took me a while to hear the Canada Quilt hollering at me from upstairs: “What am I, chopped liver?”  Nope!  It qualifies as handwork!

It has been sitting untouched in the work basket in the living room since May when the weather got too hot for me to want to sit with a quilt in my lap. However, evenings have turned unseasonably cool here this week.  I’m sure it won’t last, but as long as it does I’m happy to be able to sit and hand quilt in the evening without overheating.

Taking a break from the quilt turned out to be a good thing, despite delaying the finish. Back in May I was trying to catch up from the quilting time I missed due to tendonitis, and though I wasn’t 100% happy with some of my quilting designs I had “finish” on the brain and kept quilting even though I didn’t quite like how things were turning out.  When I spread the quilt out the other night to see what I still needed to do, those spots I hadn’t been sure about jumped out at me and I knew I wouldn’t be happy with them.  Don’t worry, it wasn’t a huge amount to unpick!  Just the bits I did in May.

Time away cleared the brain a little, and I came at the quilt with new ideas.  The straight lines behind the ship are a much better match to the rest of the quilting on the quilt than the swirly things I marked earlier.  Conversely the swirly bits I have now started quilting in the blue sky behind the lighthouse fit that space much better than the overpowering double diagonal lines I had started before. 

I’ll be making changes to what I had planned in the log cabin blocks too.  I had one block quilted with concentric circles and thought it was an original and interesting way to quilt a log cabin blocks.  Now that I’ve had a second look I don’t think it was such a great idea after all!  Just plain traditional outline quilting in the logs will work much better in this particular quilt.

At this point I think the quilt is a little less than half quilted but I have decided how to quilt most of the remaining parts. Those peaked column beside the lighthouse and ship are giving me trouble but I have finally decided to quilt everything else and see if inspiration eventually strikes.  On that note, I’m off to quilt!