It's been a long time since I've hand-quilted anything. When I started to quilt this first block for Granddaughter #3's quilt, I remembered why I wanted a quilting machine. Hand quilting is hard.
It's hard to find the right needle. There's a pile of them - all shapes and sizes - under that green bowl. They're either sharp enough to draw blood on your "underneath hand" or too dull to pierce through all the layers while maintaining a reasonably small stitch.
And dealing with thimbles.... OMG. In all these years, I've never had a thimble that would stay on my finger. I spend more time digging for it in the cushions than I do wearing it. After working on this first block, I got online and ordered one of every kind of thimble I don't already have.
But it's going better than I expected, so far.
I used temporary adhesive to make the "sandwich," and then machine-basted the layers together, all the way around the square. As you can see, the quilting is puckering the fabric a little. This puckering may release when/if I take out the basting threads. I suppose the block will need squaring later.
The quilting is going much faster than the embroidery. It took anywhere from 3 days to 3 weeks to embroider each of the blocks. I quilted 80% of this first block last evening.
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