Revving it up again

I'm finally getting back into sewing and quilting again. It's been too long coming, but you know, life....! I've really missed it, and just decided I needed to get my daughter's quilt finished, no matter what. I started this before she finished law school--and she graduated in 2007!. She deserves to have it.

It's a string quilt, and for the longest time, I couldn't figure out how to do the batting. I sewed the strings to muslin strips, then decided to add a border, then another couple of borders, to make it a generously sized sofa quilt. But the borders weren't backed by muslin, so I just couldn't figure out how to make it all a consistent thickness with the batting. I asked at a couple of quilt shops, but no one seemed to know what to do. It was so frustrating, I put the flimsy aside for years.

I pulled it out again the end of last summer, and thought I could just use batting on the borders, to make it more even, but that didn't seem to play out well once I started trying to put it into practice. So the latest plan was to just use a thin batting for all of it, and get this thing finished!

Sandwiching a quilt has been such a challenge, with a bad knee. Getting up off the floor is next to impossible. I had managed to get the quilt sandwiched using spray adhesive, but still came out with lots of wrinkles on the back. So for Christmas, Jack bought me a 6 ft long folding table. Having the table made it so much easier to smooth it all out and repin, and now I have my machine set up on the table and am finally quilting it. It's a domestic machine, and I am so rusty, but it's coming along. The table is really too high for sewing on, and I can only do it for about an hour before my shoulders get fatigued, but my goal is to finish it this month.

I'm quilting it from the back, because the myriad of patterns and sizes of the strings makes me a little cross-eyed when trying to free-motion quilt it from the front. I keep mentally chanting "finished is better than perfect" when I get frustrated.

There's a quilt-along on Facebook that I'm participating in, too. I'll post more about it later. It's hand-piecing, and perfect for winter nights!