Quilting the Background Blue

I LOVE this Tahiti Blue batik!!  It was a so much better (richer, easier to see to quilt, cool, contrasting) fabric choice for the background.  Since I changed the plan & eliminated the borders, I have a fairly good size chunk (3 yards less the strips I tore off for binding) left over for the stash - YAY!

I had a wonderful variegated blue YLI cotton thread for quilting the background. 

Again the birds are quilted very closely so I need some fairly close but not overdone quilting for the background.  The center section set the tone for the rest of the quilt. I stopped counting at 8 bobbins of blue thread (size 50) for the background quilting.  The Singer workhorse uses size 66 bobbins - not the largest but bigger than Featherweight bobbins. I think with the binding, it came out to 11 blue bobbins. 

And no, this is not how I did the background quilting for the original "Midnight Flight to the Four Winds".   I didn't particularly like that so I knew I wouldn't be repeating that part of the quilt.  I started with the center (duh, of course) in the hopes I would be inspired.

And just figured it out as I went along.

The blank blue corner squares posed a challenge, with the only solution being to quilt 'ghost' birds into them.  I first traced a finished bird shape,

  

then cut a cardboard stencil from a file folder to draw around.

At first I only had the bird outline quilted, thinking that would be enough. Not so much.

I so needed all the other background stitching to make it look finished. And yes, the extra stitching was added after I had the binding done.

Positioning the ghost bird shape was a little tricky.  I did okay on  this - only a little off on one of them, which I discovered when I did the background quilting around the bird. But I'm not telling where it is. 

Up next - the whole FG quilt is done!