Thirteen Out of Nineteen!

Thirteen out of Nineteen - Oh My!

I was physically out of the house, travelling for thirteen of the first nineteen days of October!  Thankfully, for the first four of them, I had my machine & Flying Geese project with me.  Otherwise by now, I'd be way stressing out about getting the FG quilt done and entered by the deadline.

OH - And the deadline, which I was sooooo certain was November 1st,  is actually November 4th! Not a huge difference but that gives me at least four extra shipping days to get the cd and entry form package down to Paducah. 

All the travelling has been fun, exhausting and an adventure.   I'll be posting some select pictures from the trips later but I can tell you I was out in Los Angeles 

Coral Beach, California - Pacific Ocean

& Boston in the span of a week!   

Singing Beach, Cape Ann, Massachusetts

Bi-coastal fall adventures - one country & yet worlds apart. 

On the quilt front, my focus in the evenings and weekend home has been quilting, quilting and more quilting!  Twenty-four Bird blocks take forever to quilt out. 

Okay. maybe not forever but it sure felt like it.  Doing this on a domestic machine requires a lot of start, stop, turn, wrestle, re-position, and repeat - as in sew 2 inches,stop, turn, sew a half inch, stop, turn, swear, re-position the entire top, sew 2 inches, repeat, repeat, repeat.  I actually had a moment of thinking that it was time to seriously research a mid or long arm machine - something I've resisted for forever.

Once I had the birds all quilted I had very few ideas of how to quilt out the background.  One day I'll learn to think ahead about the whole quilting pattern, I swear.  Or I can hope. 

 Since the birds are very closely quilted, I chose not to quilt the flying geese themselves, just all the blue background around them. I will say the Tahiti blue batik is much easier on the eyes than a solid black would ever be!