Back On The Chain Gang

Finished!  Yay!  This poor quilt top has been put together since 1997.  I made it in my other life, when I first started quilting.  I don't think I had any kind of pattern, just winged it.  That's pretty apparent here, since it's a mish mash of a bunch of stuff all thrown together.  It's a franken-Irish Chain I supposed.  I started hand quilting this, then it got put away when I broke ties with that other life, and wasn't looked at again until we had a minor flood incident in our last house.  When I looked at it, I was reminded that it was made to go on a different bed, and I just didn't want it anymore, but who wants to throw out that much work?

I asked one of the boys if he would like it if I finished it.  He said he thought his lady would like it, so I started looking for the thread and template I was using for the quilting.  Not much work was completed, and that was three years ago.

I recently pulled it back out, and since I'm doing some machine quilting now, and not much of this was done, I ripped out the hand quilting, and prepared to start over.

I used my walking foot to do the straight line quilting, and then I tried my hand at some free motion quilting for the hearts.

The free motion quilting is a bit wobbly in some areas, and I didn't always cross in the center at the exact same spot, but all in all, it turned out nice for a first effort.  I'm sure Adrian and Sandra will get some use out of this.

Also finished up another block for the Civil War Sampler quilt.  Again, half square triangles, sigh.  I should be really good at these once this quilt is finished!

And, a bit of work completed on the paisley pumpkin.  Excuse the weird photo.  I haven't figured out yet how to get photos of cross stitch to show up nicely.  The fabric always looks strangely pixelated, and that makes the stitching look odd too.  One day I shall figure out what settings to use to fix this!