Quilting decision!

I know you are supposed to move things like compost sacks before you take a photo but this was before breakfast

For some reason this week has felt like a real challenge. One of those weeks where all the simple things are difficult. Do you know what I mean - even down to just opening up the computer to write a long overdue blog post and something being odd with the blogger software. Anyway, I did the most important thing you can do to a computer and shut it down and opened it up again and fingers crossed everything worked. So this train of events saw me before breakfast today (yes really) trying to take a picture of the next steps of the quilt I am working on. For those of you in the UK you will know that it is wise to take advantage of any single moment it is not raining to take pictures at the moment. Even though it was not raining it was very windy and the picture reflects that I was in a hurry - but it's good enough for you to see progress and I hope I will get some better pics tomorrow ( no rain forecast in the morning!!)

By the time I got back from the supermarket, still in a hurry, it was blowing a force 10 gale so I gave up trying to take pictures outdoors.

This is the back.I was going to use a blue spot that I had by me, but I decided to use up some smaller pieces of blue batiks and a few of the leftover strips from the front to make the back. It's the first pieced back I have done and I am not sure. I will reserve judgement on that till its finished and bound.

The photos really don't so it justice. I'm so pleased with the front especially, mainly because I have made all the decisions about fabric and design myself. I fretted about how to quilt it for ages and now I have decided.

I want to practice my free motion quilting, but I'm not good enough at it yet to risk doing it on the centre panel. So I am going to ditch stitch ( half done in these pics) round the centre squares and then quilt in line with the main seams, about 1cm either side. I am then going to free motion quilt the wide border. I've seen a pattern with spirals and have the Craftsy tutorial with Leah Day and am going to try that ( after some considerable practice). And then finally I am going to quilt the outside border in lines about 1cm apart in a very pretty toning thread I happen to have. So in a kind of limited way it is going to be a sampler of different quilting styles that I am learning. I sooo hope I don't mess it up. But I have reasoned that if I never try anything new I will never learn different things. Hope you like it anyway!