Star and Leaf Quilt 4

There is an old saying, "Well begun is half done."   I am not anywhere near half done with the Star and Leaf Quilt, but at least I have the quilting started.  It took a while.  Quilting a king size quilt by hand is a difficult undertaking no matter how you quilt it.  I needed to take a sewing break and give myself a pep talk to get in the mood to start quilting it. 

Part of the reason that it took so long to get started is that I had quilting ideas that were just too ambitious for hand quilting.  I wanted to quilt small maple leaves in the yellow squares and rosettes in the red center squares of the stars.  I spent a fair time drafting the patterns.  When I started quilting the rosettes I began to run into trouble.  I could not do the whole rosette with one piece of thread.  I ended up ripping the paper pattern when I tried to tie off the knot and sink the knot for the next thread.  I had to start over. 

I started again.  This time I had figured out how to use a portion of the pattern so that I would have enough thread to get to a stopping point before I ran out of thread.  Even then, it was difficult to work with a thread that long.  The thread kept knotting.  I finished the rosette.  There was not enough contrast between the thread and the fabric.  You could barely see the thing after all that work.  I took out the stitching and started again.

The third attempt at the rosette did not go so well either.  I finished it, the contrast was better, but not great.  The worst part was that the paper had shifted slightly and the rosette was off center.  I ended up ripping it off again.  At that point I decided that my plans for the quilting were perhaps a little too ambitious.  I decided to go for a simpler manner of quilting.

I started over yet again.  At this point, I have one block completed and a second block mostly finished.  The large blocks take a long time to quilt.  Alas, my blocks are not as I wanted them to be, but at least the quilting is starting to progress.  I wish I could make smaller stitches, but they are about as small as I can make them.  My hands are getting to stiff to make small dainty stitches.  On the other hand, I have always preferred the look of quilts that look like they were made to be used rather than ones that look as if you would not dare use them for fear of ruining them.  So I guess I am satisfied enough with my quilting to say that I am going to leave it as it is.

So far, I have only worked on the star blocks.  I have not quilted any of the leaf blocks yet.  I will have to do some additional quilting other than just quilting the leaves.  There is too much space in the block to leave it bare.  I think I will do something simple like a spiral.  I really would like to get the quilting done before it gets really hot.  

I quilt in the evenings when we sit down to watch television.  At the moment, we have so much going on in the evenings that I am only quilting about three nights a week.  It is good to be in a place in life that we have many interests and social interactions.  However, it means that it is going to take even longer to get the quilt completed. 

I work on other projects during the day.  I will be blogging about one of them on the next blog post.