Christa's Colors - some progress

Life has been busy this month, particularly with work and associated travel, so not a lot of progress was made on the quilting front, but I have met my OMG of getting the yellow and purple bits of Christa's Colors quilted and moved on to some of the green.  I'm still having thread breakage issues while doing FMQ which has dulled my enjoyment of the process.  However here are some pictures showing what I did manage to achieve:

 And the start of filling the green wedges:

I am also now fully vaccinated against Covid-19 which is a relief with my business travel commitments, some of them due to be international this summer by the looks of things.

One of my sourdough loaves was really pretty this month too:

Some quilts are like fine wine.....

 .....they need to have time to mature.

I am currently working on Christa's Colors, a quilt that I started at a retreat 5 years ago in April 2016 designed by the highly talented Cynthia Spencer of Stitch Your Art Out here in Centre County PA. 

Cynthia's original quilt

Cynthia's original quilt was lovely but I wanted a bigger end product so firstly I decided to add more blocks but this took me almost a year to get around to!  With another retreat on the calendar I made the effort to have this ready to assemble there.

Not quite enough blocks

 

Enough blocks and the rows decided upon

 

After getting the rows sewn together I knew it still wasn't quite as large as I wanted so it needed borders, (almost) black borders - I had sufficient of 2 suitable fabrics in my stash so needed to audition them both and choose a final layout:

Squiggly grey on black or black Spraytime by Makower?

Without sashing?

Or with just a thinnish strip to separate the rows?

 

I settled on the squiggly grey on black for the setting and to have thin sashings between the rows.  Off I went to retreat and came home with this:

A flimsy!

I really liked the top I ended up with but had no idea how I was going to quilt it, and it needed thoughtful quilting to help those bright colours sing even louder, but I had an ideal backing and black batting so I even got it pin basted in May 2017 and then it became one of my PIGS (Projects In Grocery Sacks) and matured for another nearly 3 years.  At that point it started whispering to me, first who it wanted to be owned by and then how it wanted to be quilted, yes quilts talk to their makers, no we are not crazy, this is a real thing! So late in 2019 or early in 2020 off it went to my Tuesday quilt group where there were tables big enough for me to lay it out and mark it up for quilting, then covid hit and my quilting mojo decided to go into isolation without me :(

Pin basted

 

Fast forward yet another year and it is finally under the needle of my sewing machine being quilted, and I would really like to get it done in the next couple of months.  

There will be different textures for each colour

I think getting in all quilted in one month may be too ambitious, so my One Monthly Goal for April 2020 is to get all the yellow and purple quilting done with the red and turquoise (or whatever is left) slated for May.

In other news Smokey thinks the weather is nice enough to catch some rays on our Adirondack chairs in the back garden.