The past five days have been spent mostly quilting the Paint Chip Challenge quilt, Cipher. I made good progress while listening to several audiobooks! (I'll review those in my End of April blog post.)
Quilting took longer than I anticipated as I ended up custom quilting all of it - switching feet back and forth from a walking foot to a ruler quilting foot to a free motion quilting foot; and changing thread colors from black to green to light blue to dark blue (with pale green in the bobbin).
Just as I like, there's lots of texture.
Also lots of thread-burying! I know some quilters simply shorten their stitch length when they start and stop quilting in the middle of a quilt, then clip the threads. But many years ago I made the decision to always take time to tie and bury threads. I never know which quilt I make might be judged (unless, of course, I'm specifically making a quilt for a charity), so it's always good to put my best foot forward.
When black perle cotton arrived on Thursday (ordered through an Etsy shop), I was able to start adding big stitches that somewhat mimic the slant of the bias tape.
Now I'll stop big stitching for a little bit so as to finish the quilt edges.
Slashing and resewing the quilt as I did (all the way through the top, nine times) gave me uneven edges. I'll trim those off and sew a facing. While I'd initially thought to bind the quilt with the black and white stripe, I decided it would be too distracting from the stripes in the quilt design. Once the facing is on, I can continue to add big stitch hand quilting "as desired."
That will be good because I can take it on our upcoming Central Florida MQG three-day quilt retreat. Yay!
My second almost-finish is my 41-peg round loom knitted poncho. I completed knitting two panels.
Using a mattress stitch, I sewed the two panels together by hand. It looks okay, but I've decided to use the leftover yarn to crochet around the neck of the poncho. The neckline seems a little loosey-goosey, so maybe crocheting around it will help with stability. The Youtube pattern for the Seed Stitch Poncho is here.
When it's completely done I'll fold it up and put it away until next January. Ha! Poncho-wearing in Florida isn't a thing. Linda
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