The joy of quilting

I picked up this old thing to put some stitches in when I didn't have any applique ready to stitch and I'd forgotton how much I enjoy hand quilting on it. I think I might have got a bit bogged down thinking about how much left there was to do and how long it would take. Forget all that, I'm over it and not feeling the pressure any more. I gave myself a good talking to. It worked.

The hardest part is stitching the inside of the applique because none of the background  is cut away and I'm quilting with a cotton batting.

Do you worry about how your stitches look?

Do you compare yourself to other quilters?

Do you get the ruler out and measure how many stitches to the inch you do?

I don't because I lost my quilters competitive streak a while ago, I don't enter shows and I quilt how I quilt and that's good enough for me. I'm happy with what I do. That's not to say that I don't try to make improvements from time to time. I do try to take five minutes every so often to do some pretty stitching, just so I don't deteriorate.

I'm doing my version of echo quilting around the applique, it's quite meditative and exactness doesn't seem to distract from this since it'll be really crinkly after washing.

Oh and I'm being true to my word and getting in some machine quilting practice too. I love this one a lot and found it easy enough. I do believe I might be getting somewhere. I'm amazed at how much the practice is helping.

I wanted to take some photos of some quilting tools I've been trying out but it's been a grey wet day so it'll have to wait until next time.

In the meantime, you could go visit the Minnick and Simpson blog to check out a whole heap of hand quilting information with a series of really great blog posts.

Have you visited  Glorious Applique lately? There are some beautiful blocks being shown in different colour schemes. I've just stuck my latest progress report on there too.