New Direction

For weeks now i have been dreading working on my table runner. The dark green machine quilting just wasn't doing it for me. In fact, I absolutely hated it. I dreaded going back to my machine and continuing with the quilting. I have to admit that when I started the quilting I was actually surprised that I had bought dark green quilting thread, I expected to have a beige thread. What was i thinking?

After hemming and hawing and dreading, I finally made a big decision. I started removing the machine quilting.

 You can see the markings of the inner diamond near the pin where I removed the first row of dark green thread. I am going to keep removing the machine quilting row by row and then hand quilt with a beige thread as I go. Here the inner diamond is now hand-quilted and the green thread has been removed from the second diamond. Much better.

 Here is a close up of the hand-quilting.

This will take longer to finish, but I will be much more satisfied with the final result. The machine quilting wasn't giving me the look I wanted. I don't know whether it was just the dark thread or the fact that the needle was struggling with all of the intersections. I hope I like the beige thread on the dark green fabric, but I can always buy a spool of dark green hand-quilting thread if necessary.

While I was quilting on my front porch this morning this beautiful cardinal was serenading me.

I was trying to zoom in to get a better shot when he flew away.

This week, I have also made some progress on my Prairie Schooler Santa.

Baker Beach has gotten some attention also.

Last week I was here:

This week I have moved on to a darker gray. I think you can see the progress.

I am joining Kathy on today for some Slow Sunday Stitching. Tomorrow I will be a part of the Stitchery Link Party over at Super Mom - No Cape. I hope you will pop on over to their sites to see what other bloggers are stitching.

Thanks for stopping by!