Slow Going

It's Sunday and foggy and lots of rain is blowing in on the wind as I begin this post. It's nice to be indoors where it's cozy and warm. Today I'm linking up with Kathy at Kathy's Quilts for Slow Sunday Stitching. We also link up with our church on line for the Sunday morning service and are so glad in this time of Covid 19 for the technology available to make this happen. But it's early yet and I have a little time to write about my slow progress this week on Abigail's quilt.

I contemplated long on how to quilt Abby's Roman Square quilt, I had plenty of time to think about it while I waited about a month for the backing fabric I ordered on line to be delivered. In that time I made a sample quilt and came up with what I thought would be a good quilting pattern and tried it out on the sample. It didn't turn out well at all. I still like the little quilt I made, but I don't want to look too closely at the quilting because it is so disappointing. The design was inspired by one recently posted on Lori Kennedy's blog. I had tried doodling her design but my doodling didn't turn out well until I changed it up to the design shown here. Sadly my free motion quilting experience is very limited and this simply didn't turn out as I had sketched it. Anyway it was back to the drawing board, so to speak.

Abby's middle name is Rose and I originally wanted to use a continuous line rose pattern for quilting but I couldn't find the pattern. I knew I had one, it's part of the set Follow the Line Quilting Designs by Mary Covey for That Patchwork Place. It was visible in the little instruction book that comes with the pattern packet, but the page with that design wasn't in the packet and I didn't know what I'd done with it. Fortunately I happened across it while looking for something else recently. I really need to keep things where they belong! It could have been a very long time before I found that pattern.

Anyway, I was happy to find it and to find that the dimension fit the rows on Abby's quilt perfectly.  I changed it up a little bit, deleted some loops and simplified the center then made three stencils for the three parts of the rose. Over the weekend I made a little table runner to use as a sample for the quilting. The stencil worked out nicely though my placement could have been aligned better. The marking took a long time, but once it was ready the quilting itself went quite quickly.

So Monday of this week I began tracing them onto the quilt. So far this week I've spent somewhat over 12 hours tracing the pattern onto the quilt top and have 9 rows left to mark. The good news is that each row gets smaller as I go along. I started marking in the center of the quilt where the rows are the longest, marked four or five of the longest rows and then moved off in one direction toward one corner of the quilt.

Now I'm back to one of the longer rows, 17 blocks, but as I said each row will get smaller by two as I make my way to the finish. The marking is tedious and my back gets sore from leaning over my cutting table for such long periods of time. So though my week hasn't been taken up with slow stitching it's certainly been S L O O O O W.

So today I think I want to take a break from marking and actually work on some slow stitching, and I have many options for doing that. I still have about two inches to finish on blanket stitching around the outside edge of my little needle book that has come to a standstill because it is so tedious. Next needle book will be done differently. There is the purple witch's boot project to work on, and a small purple whole cloth quilt (pictured here) that I started hand quilting many years ago that has fallen by the wayside. I've recently pulled it out of hibernation and have done a little work on it over the last couple of weeks. Each of those projects feature my favorite color, purple, so I'll leave off there and not go into the yellow, green, blue, or hexagon UFOs that await my attention.

Well, this post has been rather slow going too, I've had some trouble with the new blogger format and had to revert to the original version to make my post. I've taken time out for our church service, which was on REST and very welcome and timely. The fog has lifted and the rain has stopped but the sky is still cloudy and gray and the wind is still blowing, a perfect day for sitting in a comfy chair and stitching. Guess I'll get to it. 

I hope you are well and enjoying this day.

I'm linking up with Kathy for Slow Sunday Stitching at https://kathysquilts.blogspot.com/