We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat!*

I made the long solo trip back from Norfolk on Monday, helped along by a packet of M&S giant chocolate buttons. I unloaded the car but still have not unpacked. Before I left I had prepared a customer quilt with a tight deadline so I had to get straight on with it the next day. It was a hexagon quilt that 2 sisters had completed for their 92 year old Mother. The layout was unusual because instead of a simple flower-garden layout, it had random patches of colour as it was actually a herbaceous border, which I thought was very clever.

The next quilt was HUGE at 110” square and it only just fitted onto my frame after I removed a couple of fittings at each end. I had a 14 ft. quilt frame for years and rarely needed that extra space but now that I have a more modest frame I have had 2 enormous quilts arrive within days of each other. I am told that they were lockdown projects that just kept getting bigger. The pineapple log cabin quilt looks fantastic but it is really heavy and I am not sure I would like to make a bed with it on a daily basis;)

While the quilt machine was doing its thing and I was keeping a close eye on things, I did some hand-stitching on my circles. I have no idea whether I will finish this project in time for Festival of Quilts but that is my intention. 

On Saturday a customer brought in a wedding quilt with a stained-glass central area. She wants to add embroidery later but she was not keen on the easiest / quickest option of simple background quilting. We settled on a leaf motif in the HST blocks which I had to edit in ArtnStitch to remove its pantograph tails. The central area was quilted stitch-in-the-ditch with invisible thread. 

I have a few more quilts to do next week - it seems to be either feast or famine. I have not made a video for a while so I should really do that if I hope to get more than 300-odd Youtube subscribers!

*In the 1975 hit movie “Jaws”, Martin Brody, the Police Chief of a small summer resort town in the northeastern United States, utters one of the most quotable lines in film history when he gets his first up-close look at the Great White Shark.