Proud, happy & thrilled

I began piecing this quilt more than 3 years ago; looking at my blog posts about it, I see I got the top put together in about a month. I basted it in the late Autumn of 2012, then began 3 years of quilting.

3 loooong years of quilting.

Not 3 constant years of quilting -- I would work diligently for a while, be overcome by the boring & tedious nature of the quilting I chose, then I would put it away for a month, a few months, a year. I finally got tired of the thing lying around & soldiered through. I put the last quilting stitch in a week ago today. After finishing, I would have Sworn an Oath that I would never quilt another quilt in that sort of dense, echoing way again.

But a week has passed & the memory of the boring tedium is fading.

Some time ago, after 2 failed attempts, I got to Hollis Chatelain's class at Quilt Festival, "Quilt Line as the Third Design Element." The only class supply we were to bring was an un-quilted top. Through the day of the class, the 25 or 30 of us would show our top, then with Hollis leading the discussion, we would talk about ideas of how to quilt it. I think after waiting years to get into this class, my expectations were pretty high. I suspect I was hoping for some sort of magic algorithm -- 

If This, Then This = Awesomely Quilted Quilt. 

Instead, through the day I heard Hollis ask the same set of questions to each of us. By early afternoon, I was sitting there like Peggy Lee wondering, Is That All There Is?

It has taken me this long to find the value in the questions Hollis asked each of us:

What is this quilt for?
What is your favorite thing about it?
What do you want to emphasize?
What do you want to achieve?

My Laura's Lightning is to be a utilitarian quilt; I really like the combination of fabrics, colors & I wanted to emphasize the zigzag streaks of lightning. I think I may have blundered onto the perfect quilting to achieve that. I am now hand-stitching the binding & am eager to pop it in the washer & dryer & get a good look at this quilt.

In other news, the chaos & mess in my sewing room has gotten SO BAD, trees are starting to grow!

Topping the top chart

When I was a pre-teen & young teenager, the local AM station (WHB, the World's Happiest Broadcasters, dial Seventy One-derful on the dial) put out a weekly list of the top 40 singles. 45 rpm singles, do you remember them? I used to get mine from a rack at the drug store that was next to the TG&Y that was next to the grocery store my family went to. They kept a pretty good selection of singles & there on the counter near the record rack would be that week's WHB Top 40 -- a list of songs with that week's ranking & where they had been the previous week. On the back would be the lyrics to one of the songs. And because you can find anything on the internet, this is what they looked like:

Anyway, what was my point? Oh! The tops I've been sewing up made me think of WHB's Top 40. (My mind works in mysterious ways.) Not quite 40, but my stack is growing.
And not just tops, backs too!