Getting the Rhythm

Oft times it takes me a while, when working a quilt, to find my quilting rhythm. How to travel from here to there with minimal thread breaks. Or, as in yesterday, getting all the motifs stitched in so having to go back and fill what I missed is minimized. 

This is one of those spots where I finally got my rhythm...

Getting ready to put in the 1/4" echo

I missed this repeatedly when I first started. Probably because I was worried about ditching the area around the rectangle, which is also needed.

I timed myself to see how long it takes just to do one colored section of this quilt...

 Nearly 4 1/2 minutes

Which doesn't seem like much, does it? There are 11 colored sections in every other row. Let's round up and say it takes me five minutes. Times 11. That's nearly an hour per colored row. Now I have to advance the quilt to do the next row and baste everything down before I can even get started. 

This is why custom quilting takes so long. This is why I'm still working on Joyces quilt today. But by lunch time it should be finished. 

Here's what I'll be working on this afternoon...

Going to make this come to life

This is for a Hale guild member and she's going to be putting it on the wall. I think it's actually for one of her kiddos. 

The phone was hopping yesterday with well wishes from family and friends for my birthday. But, we received some disturbing news just before lunch in that the work comp claim for Jims fall two weeks ago was denied. Our neighbor, who used to work in HR at GM, gave a little advice, and Jim is going to be trying to get to the bottom of this today. 

Meanwhile, and for the time being, I'm the sole income now for us and wow does that put a lot of weight on my shoulders. But, that's life. We deal with it. We move on. It's not the first time we've been in a pinch and I'm sure it won't be the last either. We are the DeGroots after all and seem to have our share of events not fall in our favor.