Quilting Moves Forward

As you know if you have been reading this blog, I am a hand quilter with no interest in changing. Don't get me wrong, there are some machine quilted works that are impressive, but I don't want to make them. I have finished the center section and I am moving to the area around and including the applique section. Surprise, surprise--the applique section will take longer. Each separate applique element whether it is the parrots, the flowers, or the leaves needs separate quilting within the shape plus separate quilting around the element.

I hope to post some photographs tomorrow but I have to take one of my cats to the veterinarian tomorrow to have some sutures removed. He had a lump removed ten days ago along with having some teeth pulled and a biopsy done on the lump. He has a mast cell cancer but the veterinarian thought he would be all right. He is already about twelve--we don't know for sure since he was abandoned at the barn where my daughter-in-law keeps her horses. He is a good cat and I sure don't want him to suffer.

Update: We had to wait for our son to bring parsley stems and carrot peelings from the restaurant for my friend who keeps hens so my husband went ahead and took a picture tonight. It wasn't until I finished the spirals in the corner motif that I remembered that the oldest quilt fragment known that from the Siberian/Mongolian border shows a stylized spiral design in quilting. It is described as a rug rather than a bed covering and dates from 100 to 200 BCE. When my husband and I go to Europe we spend a great deal of time in churches and cathedrals where spiral mosaics and "mazes" are quite common.

In this quilt, the corner motif is larger than the central motif but they both feature spirals as the primary design element so they work well together.You can also see the difference between the quilted parrot, right side of photo, and unquilted parrot. The background grid is half inch squares so that gives an idea of the scale.