Finishing the unfinished

Despite starting the new orangey-one, I did take the time to sew a binding down on a very old one while watching people drop like flies on Midsomer Murders. This one has been unfinished for several years - I hand appliquéd the orange peels in an attempt at re-creating something old fashioned, and started hand quilting it too. But there was something wrong with the backing fabric - it was so sticky to stitch for some reason - and I got frustrated and gave up. Here's the post I did at the time in April 2011! Over five years.



So I decided just to machine quilt it. I didn't even unpick the little bit of hand quilting that I'd done - just sewed over the top of it. And I did big feathers again - kind of in line with the orange peel pattern, but mostly not. I thought about doing something that reflected the pattern, but the appliqué was starting to come away already (yay for the quality of my hand stitching) so it was probably best to stitch over the top as much as possible.



There you have it - not perfect but done! It had been sitting on the shelf of doom for five years, so I regard it as an absolute accomplishment, no matter the quality of the work itself. I had called the backing fabric a grumpy check because it was so hard to stitch so I named the quilt "The Grumpy Czech". Boom boom.

And I did go back to Spotlight for another roll of the batting. We had book club at the National Library cafe on Sunday morning - it was such a beautiful sunny winter morning and we sat outside in the sunshine and talked about lots of things including briefly the book. There was the Million Paws Walk around the lake so we could watch all the puppies go by.