On a Roll with Duck and Cover

I finished FMQ on Strawberries and Chocolate.  All that is left is to wash it and it is all ready for the baby. I took some photos tonight but they are really dark and dingy looking.  The pinks are really more lively and crisp that the photos would leave you to believe. I will need to take some daylight photos and post in another blog entry.

When my kids were born 26-32 years ago there was no pretense of knowing the sex so most items were gender neutral.   I would not have sewn a pink quilt- blue maybe, but certainly not pink-  until after the baby's arrival.  Someone in my chorus group told me how her grandson was supposed to be a girl and there was a surprise in the delivery room.   If that is the case for my daughter, this baby is going to have a lot of wrong-gender-specific handmade items!  I bought into this girl thing hook, line, and sinker.  The little witch girl quilt that is in line for quilting is pretty girlish, too.

But at least the strip quilt, Duck and Cover, my latest FMQ in progress, can be for either sex.  So far I have done my stitch in the ditch between the strips.

I have also decided and quilted an echo pattern around each large bird in the dark-blue-with-ducks-and-geese strips...

 a channel type straight line pattern in the yellow-with-words strips...

and a saw tooth triangular pattern in the orange-with-egg-yolks strips.

Quilting around each of the  tiny-sized ducks and geese was a challenge. They sure are not perfect but they certainly helped to develop my FMQ fabric manipulations and steering skills. You can still see a fabric markings in the orange strips since I have not washed the quilt yet. I learned my lesson with Strawberries and Chocolate. Even if the fabric has a set pattern, in the heat of the quilting moment, going forwards and backwards and sideways, you can't always tell or remember which line you were following. This time I marked them!  More and more often I managed to sew right on them, too.

Yet to do are the turquoise strips with polka dots and the white strips with diagonal ducks. I think dots will get meandering and ducks will get honeycomb pattern- not around every duck, goodness knows, but perhaps around every grouping of four or nine.


Here are my stats for this week.  After that I will link up to WIP Wednesday so I can "gander" at everybody else's work and leave comments.

Completed projects:  

1. Strawberries and Chocolate Quilt! (picture to follow)

Ongoing projects:  

1. "Duck and Cover" - have about half FMQ'd
2. Autumn Baby Quilt - make binding and spray baste this weekend 
3. Doll quilt - still awaiting binding after baby projects reach a lull
4. Seventh pair of baby socks- I want a week's worth

This week's stats:

     Completed  projects - Strawberries and Chocolate

     New projects - baby socks 

     Currently in progress - still 4

     Those in closet - many enumerated in earlier posts and not repeated here