Apples and Owls

I had been trying to decide how to quilt my apple-owl-9-patch quilt for a long time... I pieced it last July, finished the backing in November later and since then it's just been getting used to its folded-up state in the cupboard.


After reading some free-motion quilting blogs, I felt a pressure to NOT do an overall pattern but quilt something matching the 'vibe' of the quilt. Well, the vibe of a 9-patch is pretty edgy, and after all the nightmares of small square-quilting on the spring quilt, I was definitely going for curves.

I don't like stopping and starting and dealing with all the thread ends very much, so what does that leave me with? An overall design :)


Last night, I looked at this quilt, felt a big wave of "JUST DO IT" attitude coming up and quilted half the quilt with big spirals, just like I did on the brown and turquoise quilt at new year's.
I did the other half this morning, sewed on the binding that's been ready since last summer as well, hit a minor snag when I realized I had miscalculated the length of the binding by 7.5" - check out the gap in the picture below:


But I fixed that and am now half-way done sewing down the binding on the back. This quilt will be ready this weekend, yeee-haaaa! It feels gooooood! I haven't finished a big quilt in quite a while... they're all "almost ready" - not quite the satisfaction feeling I get from actually putting the last stitch in :)