Moving on to the Square Deal

"Your future depends on many things but mostly on you."

~Frank Tyger

The Square Deal is finally moving ahead again. My machine is threaded and raring to go. This one might be finished in a week or two. I divided the quilt into three sections: the center Square Deal blocks, the white sashing and inner border, and the outer lattice border. Each will have different quilting.

Free motion quilting in progress on The Square Deal

Angela Walters' recent FMQ Challenge inspired the quilting design here. It's looking better as more blocks are finished. Isn't that frequently the case? A little bit looks terrible but adding more hides flaws or at least blends them. Those straight lines are only straight-ish and their spacing was eyeballed but mostly they show as a unit that contrasts well with the curves in the red HSTs.

The first row of the design took a day with sketching, planning how to move across the blocks, and practice drawing to build some muscle memory. The next day I finished that quarter of the center but all four sections were completed by my fourth day of quilting. No, I don't quilt all day... at least I didn't this time. It was good to see my speed pick up as the quilting design became ingrained.

The border was next up because it's a larger area than the sashing and seemed trickier to fill. Better to choose this quilting before finding a filler for the sashing, which could easily have many simple designs. Part of my difficulty is that, unlike the center blocks, the lattice is free-hand cut.

As you can see in the photo below, the Xs don't line up. It looks lovely but finding a design became harder. Here are some sketches:

Border quilting ideas

I definitely want the quilting to move from block to block so I don't have to bury a lot of threads. Learned my lesson on those baby quilts. ;-) The continuous curves on the left mimic those in the center. Hey, good repeat. But... they will never line up well from one to the next because each lattice is unique. The spiral looks more like an Eye of God and doesn't seem to go with anything. However, the feathers on the side look interesting.

And here's what I finally went with:

Final border quilting idea

I almost didn't use this Greek key because its sides are straight and the lattice isn't but finally decided the contrast of straight and curves works, it repeats the straight lines in the center, and I can't think of anything else.

The quilting hardly shows on the front. It's much more visible on the back.

Quilting the lattice border

I'm just starting the first side of the border. Slow going because someone chose to quilt backwards. Instead of pushing the quilt away from me as I move from block to block, I'm pulling it towards me. When I get to the corner, I'll see if I can change directions. Too soon old and too late smart.

Reading

The plan last year was to read the books already on my shelf or dispose of them and the project started strong until it was sidetracked by many new and interesting tomes. Isn't that always the case? So much to read and not enough time.

However, several Charlotte MacLeod mystery series from the 1970s and 80s have been calling to be re-read. {Do they count if I've already read them once? I say, yes.} Charlotte writes with a breadth of knowledge about art, architecture, history, etc. {basically culture} in an equally broad vocabulary. There are words I rarely see, used with pleasure and playfulness rather than affectation. This writing style is not as common today {even though there are loads of cozy mysteries} and find I've missed it. She incorporates patter dialog - quick, fast-paced, funny exchanges that remind me of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The Sarah Kelling mysteries of Charlotte MacLeod

She had four series: Sarah Kelling {a young widow on Beacon Hill who meets an art investigator}, Peter Shandy {a New England professor of agriculture}, Madoc Rhys {a RCMP detective}, and the Grub-and-Stakers {a Canadian garden club.} Currently I'm finishing the Kelling series pictured above. The secondary characters are idiosyncratic and the situations are zany. These old friends delight my cold winter days and nights.

Enjoy the day, Ann