The quilting is done, nearly

Hello again, welcome back to the diary of a quilt!

I’ve really just had to knuckle down this week and get the hours in on this quilt to get it finished. I can’t have it going into next week or my schedule will go to pot and it’s too early for that. Having told a lot of people that I don’t listen to podcasts, I’ve given in to the idea that they are the only way to pass them time when doing this sort of quilting. So two series and a few odd episodes later and the quilting is almost complete. Here’s how it looked photographed on the studio floor earlier this afternoon…

The face on this one was a little tricky to quilt. There are areas with lots of loose mark making that’s suggestive rather than explicit in its drawing, and then there’s areas of nothing at all. The continuous line of freehand quilting doesn’t always sit so easily. I decided that the best thing was to match colour so I’ve worked with black on the black lines and a grey that matches the plain areas as closely as I could. I’ve outlined the black lines and then scribbly contour filled the plan areas.

There wasn’t much to go on in the t-shirt area. I outlined the black lines and I’ve voided the circles. My plan is to put some hand stitch into those, they are too baggy just left as they are. For the plain areas of the t-shirt I kept up the idea of the scribbly mark making and tried to mimic some of the line work that I’d done when I made the initial monoprint of the face.

Next came the satisfying job of trimming the quilt. I gave it a quick steam press first as it was a bit wobbly, lots of stitch on this one and it’s been screwed up on my lap as I’ve done the hand work. Here it is with the white bits trimmed off and the whole thing squared up. I didn’t have to trim off much more than a sliver so that was good.

Just to show you in this photo how the quilting looks on the back and the cut edge of the quilt. Obviously I’ve sliced through the quilting so I will get the binding on as soon as possible so nothing comes undone.

So final steps are to do the binding, the hanging sleeve and to add a bit more hand quilting to some areas. Then I think I can call this one finished.

Thanks of following along so far.

Love Laura x