Hurdles

Last week I spent a lot of time working on my piece for the traffic box project.  I spent most of yesterday working on it, too (except for a brief period of helping the neighbor pick cherries off his tree. He had a bumper crop this year and now I have five bags of cherries to "process").

This project has been about jumping hurdles along the way.  I submitted a drawn design but then I actually had to figure out how to make it.  One of the hurdles that took me a while to figure out was how to inset a piece with several different right angles.  As you see in the picture below, I wanted the green piece to be all one piece with no seams.

There are a couple rough points (which I hope I can smooth out in the quilting), but not bad for not having done that before.  (This pictures is actually oriented upside down).

Another hurdle, which I mentioned before, was trying to get the lines of some things to match up on both sides.  I've done the best I could on this matter but have to wait til all the quilting is done and trimming and edging to see how close they are.

Yesterday I started doing some hand stitching, before the quilting.  I was purposely trying to make my stitches different sizes and with different angles, but was finding it hard to do that.  Then I started working on the quilting.  I'm doing free motion quilting and am thinking that when this gets enlarged the "quilt police" will look at it and say "Her stitches are uneven."  I'm getting over that mental hurdle but reminding myself that most people looking at it won't be sewers or quilters.

I am trying to jump the last hurdle of time, because I am trying to finish this before our visitors arrive on Tuesday afternoon.  I'm not quite a third of the way done with the quilting on both pieces of the diptych. Wish me luck.