Gratitude Quilt - Finished

I am happy to report that I have met my goal for January - the Christmas Gratitude quilt is finished--I took the last stitches in the binding this morning. This is item #2 on my UFO list. With a goal of finishing one UFO per month, this year is off to a fine start.

This project busted the red and green fabrics in my Christmas fabric stash right down to the backing. I pieced the backing from 10 1/2" squares of all the Christmas reds and greens in my stash.

Gratitude Quilt - Quilted

My Gratitude quilt is now quilted. I hope to finish prepping and attaching the binding to the quilt this afternoon so that all that will remain is the hand stitching.

I have two more customer quilts waiting in the wings, so I have told myself I only have this afternoon to work on this quilt--then it gets set aside until after the customer quilts are finished.

Quilt Lips

I haven't posted in a while. I was waiting to post once I had made some quilting progress. It seems lately that I take one step forward and two steps back and I just can't seem to make any progress.

I intended to quilt my gratitude quilt last weekend. I loaded the backing and batting, and top on the long arm and started to quilt last Sunday. I am trying to use up batting that I have on hand and so I had loaded Warm and White batting (from the Warm Company) which you all know has no loft.

The vision I had for the quilting would have benefited more from a quilt batt with loft. I quilted spirals on three of the blocks and started to meander in the space between the spirals to fill in the space and help define the spirals. I was using green thread that matched perfectly with the green fabric in the border but it did nothing for the red fabric. My vision was falling apart. I decided last Sunday night that this was a bad plan and it needed to be abandoned.

Last week I was busy in the evenings and I couldn't get back to that quilt. Last night I frogged all the stitching and cleaned up the threads so that the quilt would be ready for quilting today with a new plan.

I decided to choose an overall quilting design that was simple. I loaded a gold coloured thread made by Superior called, Highlights #703. I have never used this thread before and I wasn't sure what tension I should be using. After trying to quilt a row and having the thread break twice, which required more frogging, and further tension adjustments, I finally have a result I am happy with.

This gets me to the title of my post, "Quilt Lips". The quilting design I chose is called, "LIPS" and utilizes my Circle Lord Wave templates.

Now that I have settled on something I like, the quilting is going along quite quickly. I feel I am finally making progress after going backwards for a week.