Quilting up a STORM!

Until the huge rain and thunder storm put my power out in the center of the LAST ROW I was quilting!

It was a doozy of a storm too….the power was out for hours, than was on again, then was off again. I gave up and went and took a nap!

Of course, it was on again when I woke up and I could have had this thing done a long time ago, but……the nap was nice too.

I’m tickled at how many are joining in with me on the One Hour of Needle & Thread challenge! I haven’t sat at mine yet today. With the power off, my house is way too dark! I’m in the woods, even with windows, it’s all shade and tree cover outside. The roof over the front porch makes that ALWAYS in shadow out there….and the basement is a hole with one small window that opens to tree covered shade so it’s dark EVERYWHERE with no power.

And too hot to want to light kerosene lamps. It’s got to be REALLY an emergency to want to create that heat in a house in the south in the summer!

However, the power came back on, and I finished the quilting!

I chose an edge to edge design that had no “real” motif to it…just swirls and curls. I didn’t want the pattern of the quilting to shout out from the quilt, I want the blocks to come forward. This quilt is all about the piecing, and there is loads of it.

I also needed something tight enough that “most” if not all the pieces had quilting running through them to anchor them down. This pattern hit nearly everything, except maybe in the blocks where the 1/2 square triangles are about the size of my little pinky finger nail.

I think it looks pretty good!

No matter what I chose, there was nothing that was going to look “1870”. Let’s be real. It’s machine quilting. Even stitch in the ditch is not appropriate quilting by machine for this kind of quilt, and I hate stitch in the ditch anyway! Baptist fans would not have hit enough of the pieces in each block leaving too many unquilted. Feathers? Noooo….that’s too fancy for this kind of quilt too. Too much icing on the cake..what’s next after that? Sew crystals to it? No thanks! This swirl will do! Swirls also perform another vaulable function….they can suck up areas of too much fullness – I had a couple blocks that were so heavily pieced that they poofed a bit, and the swirls eased them right in with no bagging or sagging.

I’m not particularly found of cross-hatching by machine either –One color of thread that crosses many colors of fabrics can make things look like a mattress pad. I used a sand colored thread that blended through everything as best as I could get it.

Now for the binding..... Red would be predictable?

But you know what I see when I look at these blocks? That Prussian blue!

It would be an unexpected punch that would tie the blue bits in the same way the yellow border made the yellows shine. I better go dig in the stash and see what I can find. But who knows, if I don't like it, I might still go with red.

Perhaps a bit later, we can have QuiltCam time for sewing on a binding!

But first – DH wants to go to town and I guess I’m going to have to ride shotgun.