making progress

Hand quilting is sloooow, and time consuming, and I recently realized that I enjoy it tremendously. Wow, what a revelation, really. I usually have no patience and like things happening right now!


So, this was me yesterday afternoon. As you can see, I don't use any hoops or frames when I hand quilt. I tried them but it just does not work for me. What I do is put my left hand under the quilt and grab it so it's steady and does not shift around and then gather a couple of stitches on my needle as I go. I finally got used to using a thimble - finger tips full of tiny holes from the needle are very painful and not attractive at all - so I finally gave in. I use this thimble.


Right now I'm working on outlining each solid square using 2 strands of matching light blue embroidery thread. I'd like to add some more quilting in the bigger squares to make it more fun and interesting. Any ideas on what could work? I'd love to hear.


I also made my August blocks for do. Good Stitches bee over the weekend. We were to make 2 scrappy blocks using this tutorial. I loved using some of my very favorite tiny scraps and I'm really glad they are finished. Somehow, these blocks took forever. The squares were small and many of them, and the fact that I sewed the corner squares upside down at first did not help. I do love how they turned out, though. I think this is a perfect block for a bee since making 2 was totally doable, making enough blocks for the whole quilt would probably kill me.

What fun projects have you been working on lately?