Swoon Sunday

On Monday.

I'm on the final stage of my Swoon quilt. I started back in January 2012 using Kona Coal and a FQ bundle of Tula Pink's Prince Charming. Sewing the blocks was fun, and the quilt top went together perfectly. Then for some reason I decided to hand quilt it. Which would have been fine, but I'm using sew simple cotton wadding, which has a scrim and is really tough to sew through. And my needle are mostly blunt as it's impossible to get suitable needles here. Gah. But I am making myself finish it, and am actually enjoying it now!

I have three blocks to complete the quilting on (two of these are in progress already, only one totally un-quilted block left.) I'm also quilting two lines of stitching to echo each cornerstone star. Some of these are done.

I'm using a combination of pearl cotton in size 8, and Aurifil 12 weight, with clover chenille needles in size 24. I think slightly finer needles would be better, but I haven't found the perfect ones yet. This past week I have decided that I do like hand-quilting, I'm just not using quite the right tools. I'd like to try more traditional style hand-quilting soon using finer thread and smaller stitches.

The biggest piece of progress for the Swoon quilt has been my decision to bind it before finishing the quilting. The edges were fraying badly and the whole quilt plus excess backing and batting was ridiculously bulky to work with. So I stitched just enough of the perimeter quilting to stabilize it, then edge-stitched the whole quilt, squared it up and bound as normal. I feels so much nicer to work with now :)