Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Things are starting to settle down ..... finally!

 My guild's biennial quilt show was in October.  I had hoped to complete a new bed quilt of my own to enter, but that didn't happen.  Too busy!  I'm not complaining, busy is a good thing.  As I said in my last post, I had 2 customer quilts to do for the show, plus the Sedlak quilt for Canuck Place.  Here's a picture of the entire Sedlak quilt ... turned out pretty good!

I then got straight back to work on Wendy's quilt for the show.  Normally I can estimate pretty well how long it will take me to quilt something.  My average hand quilting speed is about a square foot an hour.  Wendy's quilt took about 4 or 5 times longer than that.  Crazy eh!  At first I thought I must be getting too distracted while quilting, so I put all my focus on it and it made no difference ... still very slow going.  It's about 90" square, and almost all applique.    Layers upon layers of applique.  So what appears to be just a flower is actually a bunch of layers upon layers.  The stems and flowers are 4 layers themselves, on top of the backing, batting, and background.  My quilting speed slowed to a crawl every time I got to a flower, and this entire quilt is flowers.

I didn't figure out exactly how many hours I put into it, but in the last 4 days alone of working on it before the show I put in 76 hours ... including 2 24-hour straight runs!

When I finally got it done I took it straight up to Wendy so she could gather her friends and put the binding and sleeve on.  She was really pleased with how it turned out.  We laid it out on her bed to get a good look at it and I have to admit, it looks great.  I didn't get a good picture of the entire quilt ... I took one at the show but the lighting sucked and it looks yellow.  I'll have to see if she got a good one.

So now I'm back to my own work.  It's a little strange to all of a sudden be able to quilt on anything I want!  Funny how the whole time I'm working on someone else's quilt I have all these wonderful brainstorms of what I want to make, then when I can finally do it I can't make up my mind.  For now I'm going to finish up some small (12" square) quilting samples to leave with a couple of local fabric stores so they have something to show people that may want to hire me as a hand quilter.  I've got one sample done, about half finished the other one.  Then maybe I'll get back to my own bed quilt.