Scrappy Circles

I received a quilt to do even though this quilter does most of her own free motion on her domestic machine.  She then told me she prefers plain and would have opted for meandering the background and SID on the circles.

My question to her was why she’d pay someone to do something she can do herself?  I suggested making just subtle changes in the design which would have a similar effect as what she planned.

For the background I used loops which to me is the same as meandering – just another shape, it also fills the back. I repeated these loops on the wide outer border as well.

For the inner circle, I used a continuous line also just popping in the occasional circle to keep to the design.  I only used stitch in the ditch (although I didn’t really have a ditch to work with) around the outer circle.

For the inner border, I used a soft swirl just changing direction as I moved along a side.

Completed top

And as usual, the motifs can be seen better on the plain backing fabric

Kelly – A whole cloth quilt – Completed

Not a whole lot of quilting happened as we were blessed by our third grandchild, a little girl and we chose to spend our days visiting our daughter and the little one at the hospital.  Isn’t she sweet!

When I did quilt, however, I screwed it up majorly!  I forgot some lines when I traced the design, quilted the tiniest pearls in what should have been open spaces and then had to unpick.  Now, if you’ve never unpicked pebbles, stitched in manual mode in a figure 8, feel blessed…. To unpick these are hell itself.  Here I’ve marked where leaves should have been and I simply pebbled my way all over the space…… CRAP!!

Unpicked for what seems like forever but as hubby said this would bother me, even if no-one else noticed and then got moving to the next section. Now I’ve read about quilters using rulers with any foot but after having a slight incident costing a little more than I expected, I’ve never used my rulers without a ruler foot until now and I realised, it is not a race, go slow and still get it done without constantly changing feet.  Then I also tried my hand at stippling…. Man was this fun.  If anyone of my customers chooses to do the outlines (and not skip lines) I’ll gladly do the stippling and I am so grateful for Telene Jeffrey from Lady Jane Quilting for putting her patterns out there for us to experiment on and improve our skills.

Then first granddaughter ended up in hospital again and even though she entertains herself on her phone one doesn’t quite feel like leaving her all by herself.  So more hospital visits were needed.

Somewhere in between all of this, I finished the quilt and even posted a photo on Facebook but then brother-in-law came to visit from Namibia or rather on his way from Malawi to Namibia and we had to get the family together as we don’t get to see him too often.

It was only when I changed bedding this morning and put the quilt on my bed that I realised I’ve never finished the post about this one on my blog.  My first full bed size whole cloth.