Tired of seeing Dad’s quilt yet?  I might be  . . ask me this time on Tuesday!  It’s off the longarm, threads are trimmed.

The binding is on; all that’s left to be done is get the hand work done and wash and dry it before I leave on Wednesday.

I went with green binding because I thought I was getting too much red in there.  There are more feathers on this quilt than there are in that box in my downstairs garage!

Meandering is not my favorite type fill but anything too terribly dense, like McTavishing, would have made the quilt a bit stiff so I just did meandering around the background in the blocks.

But I stuck feathers in every nook and cranny I could find!  Notice the little tiny feathers in the outer sashing.  Aren’t they cute?

I hope to get a better picture of the backing because the quilting shows up really nice on the back side.

It’s been a long time in getting to this point but I hope Dad loves it!

Yesterday I realized that if I’m going to give dad’s quilt to him when I see him next week, I’d better get it quilted!

Loaded it and thought I could get it done yesterday.  What was I thinking?  Dad wouldn’t have cared if I’d done a panto or meander but I saw so much space for feathers.

Quilted til late last night and so far, all day today.  Just finished the background stitching on the last of the blocks.  Just the area below the bottom of the blocks left to do and then there’s quite a bit of fill in work to get done.

There are lots of feathers!  They’ll show up better from the back side . . if ever I get it off the machine.

My goal now is to finish the quilting tonight (and that’s probably overly optimistic), get the binding on tomorrow and do the hand work over the weekend.

It was probably 1995 . . goodness, that was 14 years ago!  My world wasn’t totally spinning out of control but it also wasn’t very stable.  I’m so thankful for quilting.  I had learned to quilt in 1980.  In about 1984, I learned to smock and was doing French handsewing and quilting took a back seat.  After my marriage breakup in 1994, I found quilting groups online and my interest in quilting was renewed.  On the weekends that Chad was with his dad, I would have gone nuts without my quilting.  Friends begged me to go out with them and being the homebody that I am, I only wanted to stay home and sew.  That probably kept me out of some amount of trouble!

At some point, I joined a two way round robin.  We got a list of names . . maybe 8 of us.  We made two centers, sent one to the name above ours on the list and one to the name below us on the list.  They made the grounds and in about a year, the completed top came back to us.

My tops took a back seat to other projects . . at the time I was making the bookshelf quilt for Chad’s teacher, I made a photo quilt for my grandma and a photo quilt for my ex-husband  . . goofy woman that I am!

In 1997, after Vince and I got married and Chad and I moved to Kentucky where Vince was already living and I couldn’t find a longarm quilter to do my quilting, I thought . . hey, this can’t be so hard.  I’ll just do it myself on my Bernina.  I started with the quilt on the right.  It is 102″ x 102″.  I didn’t know any better!  Now I do!  Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t give up on quilting completely after that project . . down on the floor to baste it and then quilt it on my sewing machine.  I quilted the one on the left too but I didn’t do nearly as much quilting on it.

Even with my lack of knowledge of machine quilting, I knew I loved feathers so . . feathers are in those big triangles.

They’re definitely not award winning feathers but hey . . they may have been the first feathers I ever made!

These tops were made with fabric from House of Fabrics (which was what we had in Lake Charles back then), probably some really inexpensive fabrics used by the others in the round robin.  These two quilts have been on our bed for at least 10 years!  Really!  These two both have really thin . . probably Quilters Dream batting so most of the time, these two are on the bed with a nicer quilt on top.  I throw the nicer quilt off at night and we cover up with these two.  We use them; we wash them often and there’s no sign of wear on either one of them.

And, do you happen to notice that one day last week I was hanging clothes on the line?  Despite our nasty weather over the weekend, spring is comin’ and I can’t wait.