Holiday Work

Holidays are sure nice to spend at home, doing whatever one pleases!  I puttered about all morning with some household chores, blogging, and thumbing through magazines for quilting ideas for Caramel Blues.  It was decided the quilt really deserves custom quilting for its traditional bones.  I remembered a recent post by Kathie http://inspiredbyantiquequilts.blogspot.com/2012/05/todays-quilt-to-bind.html.  I really liked those pumpkin seeds and felt they would look good in the 9 patches.

Some 2" squares drawn on a scrap of muslin and attached to the excess batting around the quilt sandwich were my practice piece.  I'm a "no mark" kind of gal so this was all by eyeball.

At first I was twisting the sandwich back and forth to stitch the same side of the pumpkin seed in each square, but then I remembered this post by Elizabeth Hartman of Oh Fransson regarding her orange peel quilting.  However, since I was using a walking foot and working on a diagonal, I decided a serpentine would work better.  And it did.

Some of the pumpkin seeds are nice and fat and others are a bit slimmer, but they turned out pretty well.  Only the center square will have crossed seeds (try to say that three times fast!).  Once all the 9 patches are completed, the framing triangles around each will receive some sort of stippled type design from the Free Motion Quilting book, alternating designs between the caramel and cream sections.  Not sure about the borders yet but that can be decided later.  Can you tell I'm not much of a pre-planner?