Progress on the plus-quilt

(Linking up to WIP Wednesday today :-)

Inspiration struck me, and I grabbed it by the neck and wrung a quiltbacking for the Pluses Galore Quilt out of it :-) I came up with this echo pattern of the plus theme, using a leftover block I had made by accident.

So here you have the finished back...

... and the finished front. Right now it's about 71"x85".

Here it is pin basted and ready for quilting.

Have you noticed the odd thing about it? I basted it with the backing face up. Simple reason for this: I had no clue how to quilt it based on the front, but the back inspired me to do echo quilting around the plus shape!

Here is what the echo quilting looked like. Note the tense... Yup, I hated it. But I kept going. Don't quilt with a deadline, it sucks! The quilting did not grow on me. 

Yes, you guessed it. I'm undoing it all and have switched to mussel shell quilting. This feels right. I'm quilting it from the front now. Just make taking out the pins a bit trickier... My guess is that I'm about 2/3 to 3/4 done. Hard to tell under my 33 year-old Singer :-) everything is bunched up right now...

Red White Tropical

This is one of my ancient UFOs. I've finally had a reason to work towards finishing it: a quilt show!

I promised the organizers some quilts, but haven't actually finished that many in the past year. The quilts will be picked up in a week, and I've been busy busy busy picking some UFOs to finish.

This little quilt (about 30"x40") started as a quilt class demonstration of the disappearing nine patch block. I had made the various stages of this block, and aftere the class was finished, I completed all the stagesa and put together the center of this quilt. The tropical-patterned border fabric was a find at a fabric store closing sale. It is not 100% cotton and was interesting to work with (stretchier).

I've just finished quilting this piece but haven't had a chance to take some photos. Stay tuned!