The quilt is looking good. Hopefully your hands and arms are back to normal.

Dee in TX (DBRADFOR3) said:

I guess I over did it a bit.

Back in the mid-1980s when I was working on my needlepoint floor rug I did the same thing. (This was a wool rug with a classic Oriental design that I worked on for nine months.) Finally wised up and learned to set my kitchen timer for thirty minutes so I would stop and get up and do something else for five or ten minutes and then come back to working on the rug for another thirty minute session.

In late 1992 I had carpal tunnel release surgery on my right wrist so I'm speaking from experience about that happens when you abuse your stitching muscles. (Of course I did a great deal of typing on an IBM Memorywriter in those days as well. Talk about a non ergonomic machine. )

judyinohio said:

hulled sunflower seeds for the bird feeders.

I feed my birds during the summer too and have been enjoying watching the woodpeckers and orioles at the suet feeder.  The feeding station is in the front of my house so I can watch from the comfort of my easy chair.  I decided to put a suet feed in my back yard to watch from the kitchen.  Of course those *&%^ squirrels do their best to get into them.  A couple of days ago on e of my dachshunds got sooo sick.  Throwing up bright yellow stuff all over.  Vet said she must have gotten into something but tested her liver and pancreas to be for sure.  A coupe of meds later I bring her home wondering what on earth she could have gotten into.  Later in the day I noticed the suet feeder was empty.  I couldn't see from the house but when I got closer I discovered those nasty squirrels had opened the door to the feeder and it must have fallen on the ground.  Two bricks of fat filled suet makes for a very sick dog!  Birds will have to hang out in the front of the house if they want treats.

Oh Wow!  Your stitching is amazing!  I used to quilt many year ago and could never get near such lovely stitches.  What kind of batting did you use? 

Thanks Lynne. I think it is Hobbs 80/20 buy it was a scrap so I am not certain. I don't use batting that much but that is what I normally get. Quilting with batik is challenging. But there are no seams so that helps a ton. They aren't small stitches but I am trying to keep them even. I am liking using masking tape as a guide rather than marking. That helps too because I can see them better without a marked line.

Judy, I thought of you this morning when the Donna Jordan email came. She is having a HUGE give away to celebrate their 500,000 you tube visitors. The prizes are wonderful and of course I signed up. Hopefully I will win something and I hope you will also. Thank you for giving me her site a while ago. I really enjoy her tutorials.

Enjoy your day.

NanaSuz

It is a good thing I do not live anywhere near the Jordans' shop, or I would be there ALL the time!  I have been watching their videos for a few years now, and you can just tell what good people Donna and Matt are.  I like that he is in charge of cutting all the pre-cuts and kits.  LOL  

I guess they closed their store and do everything online (according to the video this morning).. So you are safe!!

They do look like a wonderful family operation.

NanaSuz

Thank you, NanaSuz, for the alert about the giveaway for the pretty quilt. I do not receive Donna's emails (do not need the temptations that come with those) but I did scurry to the website and sign up for a chance at the drawing.

I suspect that they closed their store only because of the hoo-hah over Covid and that their store will reopen once the other merchants in their area have reopened.

I've returned to working on the quilt loaded on the longarm.  I had run out of the green quilting thread ... had to wait for that order to come in.  Then, a while later, I ran out of the gray bobbin thread .. had to wait for that order to come in.  (I checked my local longarm shop; they didn't stock the thread)

Then, "other things" intervened and I needed to wait for them to get done.   

When I last worked on the quilt, I had just finished the bottom horizontal border.   I've previously posted photos of it.  it was time to roll the quilt upwards so that the top horizontal border was exposed and I could quilt the design on it.  I (fortunately) had taken photos of what I did on the bottom border because it turned out to be a couple of weeks before I was able to return to it.  All the details, of course, had already fallen through the holes in my brain but the photos saved me.  :-)  (otherwise, I would have needed to unroll the entire quilt then re-roll it and, honestly, I'm just too lazy to do that.  :-)   )

Finally, both the top & bottom borders and the center interior of the quilt are done.  Now it's time to unload the quilt, turn it and reload it so the side borders will now be horizontal for easier quilting.

I also know that there is a really BAD section of tension in the middle someplace.  Now that I've finished the top border, I'll unroll the quilt to see where that section is and if it is really as bad as I thought it was when I first saw it.  It probably is.  That means that I'll need to ... sigh ... rip out that bad section and requilt it.  Ugh.  Ugh.  Ugh.

Did I mention ... ugh?    Ugh.

But here's progress pictures .. the first one is from 2 weeks ago, when I finished the bottom border.  You can see the scroll-y thing with feathers, along with the beadboard, the Line of Pearls right underneath the hexie units and the pebble fill.

Here's what I just finished on the border on the other end ... all those danged pebbles.  They're aren't terrific but I did try to make them different sizes and in different orientations, as well as incorporate some swirls.


Trudging onwards.  :-)