Coming Up for Air

 

Since last we spoke, I was headed off to a class with Karen Kay Buckley (who, btw, loved my needlebook from the previous post). It's amazing how you can be in a class for 6 hours and hardly accomplish anything. In fact, the blossom you see above was not completed in class, only the background, the binding around it and the cut off leaf at the top happened in class.

 

Karen uses the Thermoweb stencil method (spray starch and iron over). I've done this with freezer paper and I'm just not patient enough to want to spend all that time prepping before I sew. I gave it the old college try and spent an hour prepping a few of those petals, and then I asked myself if I was certifiably crazy, and in determining that I was not, I tossed those in the trash and cut new pieces for needleturn. Ha ha! What was I thinking?!  My curves were less than smooth, with little jagged points everywhere. Defeated, I tore it all off and went back to my stencil brush in spray starch.

 

The applique novelty quickly wore off as the deadline for the Guild's quilt show loomed.

 

For the past two weeks I have been locked in mortal combat with Vintage Rouge. That quilt must be snacking on ice cream and chocolate and chips once I finally go to bed, because it just kept getting heavier and heavier, making it quite difficult to maneuver through the old domestic sewing machine. I imagine that this exercise was much like wrestling gators in the Everglades.

 

But  persistence prevailed

 

 

All the while I'm wrestling with this under the needle I am praying to the Longarm Gods to drop a stitch-regulated, computer assisted machine in my living room while I sleep. No luck there. So I went and bought a couple of Powerball tickets...won 8 bucks. I guess one could say 'well, that's a start', and yes, it most certainly would be a 'start', if I were going to live for another 150 years.

 

I'm over the fact that the echo quilting isn't perfectly spaced, that I gave up burying thread tails after about 300 or so of those and just started anchor stitching and snipping, that some of my tiny stippling runs into each other, and that there's a little wrinkly-ness in those corner block hearts....211,781 stitches later, I'm calling it DONE!

 

What's that? It's not finished, you say? You're right. I just can't let go--I've decided that I want to do a semi-scalloped binding on the upper right and lower left corners. And since I need to do it PERFECTLY (laughter of a madwoman heard here), I'm waiting 9-14 business days for a template to arrive that I ordered last night. Hmmm.....quilt show turn-in is April 20th. If I'm lucky, said template will arrive the week before turn-in. (More likely, said template will arrive on April 19th.). Hopefully I'll take advantage of these next few weeks spent waiting to make and affix a label and a temporary hanging sleeve to this quilt. Note, I said HOPEFULLY.

Tucker is not impressed.