Quilt Along with Leah Day - Week 8

This week's task was very interesting. Even though I didn't get into quilting too long ago. I already have many UFO's. To the matter of fact my very first pieced quilt was never finished. I had used a charm pack to piece the quilt with 6 rows and 6 columns. The past weekend I added an additional row and two borders. The first one is 2.5" width and 2nd one is 5.5inch width.

Here is the picture of the quilt top all finished.

Pieced Quilt Top

This is the black fabric I going was originally going to use for my backing. But I didn't have enough fabric to do so. I guess when I bought these fabrics I didn't have any idea about how much fabric would be required for the backing, borders etc. Any way I might plan to make another quilt just like this. Or use this black fabric as the center for a different quilt. I love the flowers and have been tempted to just quilt around them and make them pop on my Quilt top. I will definitely do a post on this if I do another quilt with this. I'm just so in love with this black fabric. It looks like flowers floating in water. The colors are really vibrant.

Black flowers fabric by Kitty Yashodha for Benartex

I got the quilt top all ready by Monday evening and its now Wednesday evening and still haven't got a moment to baste my quilt.
This week I'm struggling to find time to quilt. I can't wait for the baby to get back to his normal schedule of sleeping at night and taking his naps. The basting step seems to be never happening.
Its Thursday morning on March 1st, I finally got time to baste my quilt. Hopefully I should be able to finish quilting it tonight. Lets see...

Its Thursday midnight or Friday early morning ;) and I finally got to finish up my quilt. Binding is yet to be done. But thinking of doing it later and adding the picture.

Quilt Front

Quilt Back

My experience:
I wanted to share my experience with large scale stippling. I would have to say it was kind of tough. I think the last one I did with the Butterfly quilt was about 1/2inch wide. Which seemed to be a perfect size for me. This time I started with 3/4inch wide stippling but at some places you might see that its as wide as 1inch. I did do the quadrant quilting like Leah's mentions in her blogs. I following everything she is saying but I really don't have any control over either on my rows nor the direction it went. But somehow each time I managed to fully quilt one quadrant and then moved to the next adjacent one.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-eOpPsecyU&feature=g-all&context=G2d2d068FAAAAAAAACAA 

Also the other thing I noticed I was doing is like Leah shows in her Quilt Along - Week 9 above is that I was trying to look at my quilt too to see what I had stitched before. And that position was straining my neck. I didn't have the same problem when I did the 1/2 inch stippling. So, my conclusion is that large scale stippling is really challenging on my domestic sewing machine.