I've been in the process of working on quilts for my daughters since about August. It's been a long haul and I have done other projects throughout. There has been many moments of despair as I've thought that I'm never going to finish, but the light is at the end of the tunnel, sort of. I have completed hand quilting one of the quilts, and am almost ready to begin quilting on the second. The second quilt top is finished (yay!) and needs to have all of it's layers pin-basted. And then it's time to quilt. I estimate that it took about 12 hours to do the hand quilting. Maybe more. I'm really glad I did it. I knew I wouldn't love what I could do with my sewing machine and I didn't want to pay someone else to professionally quilt them ($$$), and I did want to develop hand quilting as a skill, and I like the way it looks, and I wanted to do something extra special with these quilts... Lots of reasons why. Honestly, I was wanting to quit while I did my first little bit. It was hard and my stitches were so long! I wish I had taken a picture of the first square I did. The stitches were literally 2-3X the length of the ones later on. But I unpicked that first go and re-did it. I watched this youtube video a few times and quilted along with it (the lady is so encouraging!). I hand-quilted a quilt before Holly was born but totally did it my way and did not use proper technique. I wanted to do these ones right! So far, really happy with the progress, but feeling paranoid about shrinkage. Roller coaster ride!!
