THE QUILT TOP IS DONE!

Lars's Drunken Dragons Quilt Top, Fully Assembled, 70" x 105"

Lulu the Puppy Princess Poses with the Quilt Top

All 150 Drunkard's Path blocks have finally been assembled for Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt top.  Ta da!  I am really not as excited about this as you might expect, though, because I am much more confident in my patchwork skills than I am in my quilting skills, so the rest is all going to be uphill, with lots of experimentation and frog stitches (rip-it, rip-it!) along the way.  I even bought a new seam ripper, nice and sharp and ready to go.  How's that for a positive attitude?

Lulu kept prancing into my view finder when I was trying to get a picture of the quilt top.  She doesn't understand why anyone would want to see a picture that doesn't have a puppy princess in it.  Indeed!

Meanwhile, I still don't know for sure how I'm going to quilt this quilt, so it's time to take a break for some Research & Development.  I'm leaning toward quilting a decorative motif in the center of each circle with the "quilt in the hoop" embroidery method, but I can't get a large enough design (width-wise) in any of my machine's hoops and I don't feel like messing around with the Hoop-It-All Quilter's Square contraption for this project.  So I'm thinking I'll enlarge the selected motif as big as I can fit in my hoop, and after I've stitched one out on each circle, I'll go back and do some echo quilting around them with free-motion quilting (FMQ) to fill the rest of the circles.  That's my compromise between wanting to learn and practice FMQ and not wanting to mess up this quilt that I'm going to have to look at every day on Lars's bed.  Then I think I'll do grid quilting in the background with a walking foot, because one of the things I like best about this quilt is the contrast between the curved lines and the squares, so curvy quilting lines inside the circles, straight lines between them, should play that up nicely.  I'm still kicking around the idea of machine trapunto for added dimension on the circles, but I'm wondering if that's too large of an area to do trapunto and if that will make the quilt too bulky to work with under my little sewbaby.  I'll try to take pictures and post the results of my quilting experiments as I figure it all out.

Can you spot my "oops?"

This little "oops" was annoying to discover in the very last row of the quilt.  I thought we were really careful when we did the block layout to be sure that we didn't place blocks with the exact same fabric next to one another, but this one slipped by somehow.  Whatever -- I'm leaving it.  Nobody's perfect, right? It's not that big of a deal, and this is the bottom of the quilt, where I'm going to tuck it underneath the edge of the mattress so that all of the bedding doesn't end up on the floor every morning. 

I don't know when I'll get back to this project.  I've got receipts strewn all over the place that I've been organizing on-and-off for the accountant so he can prepare our taxes, and I really need to finish that up this week and cross it off my list.  (I wish I could just shove it all into a grocery bag and dump it out on his desk).  We're also taking Otto back to the vet tomorrow morning because it looks to me like he managed to pop a couple stitches and his incision is opening up instead of healing.  It has been nine days since he had his neutering operation, and I really had hoped he'd be back to his normal, rambunctious routine by now. 

At least he's getting used to the Cone of Shame and no longer cries constantly while wearing it.  Now he's actually using it like a snowplow, crashing into things or people deliberately with the cone.  That's what all the dents and dings are from.  Hopefully the vet will be able to seal his incision back up with a couple drops of surgical glue rather than having to restitch.  Cross your fingers for my puppy rabbit!