Progress

I managed to finish cutting out all of my fabric and I have gotten almost half of the 16-patch blocks sewn. I will work on the rest tomorrow. With chain piecing, it really does go pretty fast.

But all that brings me closer with my dilemma. How to finish up this quilt? Hiring it out is simply not in the budget right now. My $$$ would be better saved up for a better sewing machine. I am capable of hand quilting it, but during the school year, that takes a LONG time.

It might be silly, but I would be thrilled if I could take it back to Silver Thimble next month with it ready to put the binding on. I'd like to learn more about the proper way to do that. But, that could be absolutely not realistic. We'll see.

Theoretically, I could machine quilt this one. I have taken classes on doing that and have done a few. However, Murphy's Quilt with minkee is haunting me and I am afraid of doing anything very large. I am not sure if the minkee was the total problem or if my machine just couldn't handle the weight of the project in addition to the problems with the minkee. That project stole a lot of my confidence.

So, I have the option of breaking it up into smaller units so that I can quilt without dealing with the bulk or the weight. It's a thought. I would have to be terribly careful about leaving room for joining the sections together.

Ideally, I would like to do a heart pattern in each of the focus fabric blocks with just stitch in the ditch on the 4-rail and 16-patch blocks. The heart pattern is very simple, a heart with two small swirlies on the sides of the bottom. Very cute. But, I haven't successfully done any free motion quilting in years.

Maybe I can pick up some inexpensive muslin and practice a bit with scrap batting to see if I can get the feel of it back. Machine quilting in sections seems like the safest bet to getting this thing finished in a reasonable amount of time.

If you are lurking here, tell me what you think. I am open to suggestions!