Centennial Quilt is Complete, Yeh!

Yes, you've heard it all before, but really this time its really done!!

It was actually a hard feeling and a good feeling today when I dropped off the Smithers Centennial Quilt to Heather Gallagher at our local Smithers Chamber of Commerce.
My mind ran over all the little details of how this piece came together, how many revisions I made, how many times I pulled out stitches and I even bled on the quilt ~ last night!

Someone asked me how many hours I had put in, well, I just laughed! I started out trying to figure that out, but as deadlines approach, the details of tracking became fuzzy to say the least.

The little gold colored threads are not threads, they are metal wire! I learned a thing or two from artists who don't normally work in textiles, their mind went somewhere else completely. These cute little curly cues were a #%*&@ to work with and to machine quilt around. But alas, I mastered the challenges one by one.

 

 

 

And like any good little quilter, I cleaned my machine every time I sat down to do more on the quilt. Hence, the experience left me with no after affects of pain around the performance of my Baby Lock Melody. Plus I became very aware of how much a new needle, freshly placed really does save you anxiety!!

Not to mention, the unique ability of my new Baby Lock Melody has to adjust to differing thicknesses of batting, wow, did I put this machine through it paces!! Very excellent results. Here my machine is sewing down through two layers of batting, doilies and two layers of cotton.

 

 

 

This was last night, working away around 7 pm, the warm evening was calling me to a fire outside, but no, I was hand sewing to get this quilt finished.

 

 

 

 

 

And then its done, Sir Alfred goes to live somewhere else! What's still to be done? The formal label describing the quilt, its participant artists and the artist who pulled it all together needs to be ordered, hand stitched onto the back, then hand quilted to the back, followed by arrangements with the Town of Smithers upcoming council meetings and the formal handing off of the quilt to them. Then I walk away from the care of this volunteer effort on the part of myself, my hubby who fed me, did all the housework and laundry and continued to support me in my darkest hours of things not working out and the artists who provided me with a piece that went into this quilt. They too will go down in history.