The Week's Progress

What started as feeling like a slow crawl of quilting on the fat quarter quilt borders has sped up some as I got into a rhythm of following the paisley designs in the fabric. It's not particularly straight forward with one paisley leading to the next, and there are times when I quilt myself into a corner or miss going into an area, requiring a stop or start in an odd place. Just keep reminding myself of the "aha" moment I had early in my learning to free motion quilt: Just because you are working on a "continuous" design doesn't mean that you have to stitch continuously and can't stop to reposition your hands or assess where to go next or even to backstitch and cut threads to start again in another spot. The beauty of this quilting is that it literally cannot be seen (except on the back) and thus I don't really need to worry about quilting exactly along the line of a paisley or those times when my stitches get uneven. I'm just going for the texture here and to highlight those paisley shapes. I know that when I first started quilting on the first border, I was pretty obsessed with going around every shape, even the small ones and that was making things slow going. But as I worked along the top border this week, I simply couldn't stop myself from continuing that somewhat, even though I want to go faster. As I finished the top border, I just rationalized that the borders may as well be densely quilted because the rest of the quilt is densely quilted as well.

I wasn't sure I'd get the whole border done by the end of the week so I was much pleased when I did. Side borders are a little longer I think but it would be nice to see each one finished in a week as well. I have to say, I still love the colors and the fabrics in this quilt, 20 years after I bought them. While I'll admit to having fabric in my stash who's colors and/or prints look dated, none of these in this quilt strike me that way. Good thing, huh?