Steer Clear of the Rocks

It's been steady quilting for about the past 36 hours. I did take time out to sleep and eat, but that's about it. Oh yes, and I remembered to pet the kitties. But then I was right back at it, quilting my guts out until I am happy to say I have finished quilting the rubber duckies.

It took me most of the day to finish the block sets yesterday. At one point I took the quilt off the machine and laid it on the floor for a picture. Then I turned around to reach for my camera, and when I turned back...

Oh...hello!
Well, I wasn't quite finished yet, but when I had all the block sets finished it looked like this:

Here's how it looked from the back:

Here's a close-up of the front:

When I quit for the day, just the borders remained to be quilted.
This morning, I started on that first thing. I was doing my version of a motif I saw on the Inbox Jaunt. Lori Kennedy calls her version "Paper Clip". As I linked to that, I realized mine was just a little bit different...sort of a more controlled spiral than I usually do.

As I've been quilting with the yellow thread, I've been keeping an eye on the spool. I had just a 250-yard spool of it, and I worried that I might run out. The closer I got to being finished with that color, the less I worried about it.
So I'm going along on my yellow border there, and I'm thinking to myself how well it's all going, and I'm going pretty fast, and it's just smooooooooth sailing, right? Well, I should know by now that as soon as you start thinking it's smooth sailing, you'd better be watching ahead because you're about to steer your boat right onto the rocks. And sure enough, when I had like one more round-about to do, I ran out of yellow thread. @#*%@#!!!

See that tail in the image above? That's where I started. That's where I wanted to finish. Dang! Can you believe that?

Oh, but don't forget to check the back because the tension was all effed up there too. Thanks a LOT, Obama!

So I had to take the stitching out about three twists and turns back to here:

Fortunately, I had a thread color downstairs that was almost exactly right. It isn't the nice YLI, but it worked so that I could finish this up. I think it looks fine.

And it only took me about a full hour to get going again so that I could finish because I was having trouble getting my tension right.
Anyway...here's how it looks from the back:

And then I just had the outer border to do. I had in mind to do a different design when I started this, but then decided to echo the water theme from the duck blocks. It's essentially a meander that wanders far and wide. Simple and fast. I kind of let the ducks tell me where to stitch.

And here's how it looks from the back:

So I'm ready to do something else for a while. I need to feed the birds, walk on the treadmill, chase Smitty around a little, make some stuff for dinner tonight. Before the day is over, however, I'm going to find the time to get the binding sewn onto this quilt and then it will be headed toward the finish line. Pin It