Quilting the Mystery--Sixth Step Shadows and Final Border

Large square pebbling

Since the last post of documenting this project, I finished quilting the narrow pink border. Since red thread was in the machine, I decided to quilt all the areas that required that thread color. I pebbled the center circles of the flowers. Pebbles are also in the center section of the quilt so this was a way to unify the quilting. There were two sizes of squares in this quilt. It took me about 10 minutes to quilt each of the larger squares and about seven minutes to pebble each smaller square.

I also pebbled the brown squares. My thought was the viewer, when standing in front of the quilt, would see the pebbles. When the viewer was nose close to the quilt, they would see that the pebbles were the center of a flower motif.

Loops added to the square in a square blocks

Once I had completed quilting the shadow in the squares, the quilt was telling me that it wanted a little more "something" in the square in a square border. When I have trouble figuring out what the "something" is, I look at other parts of the quilting to see if there is a "part" that could be repeated.

I decided a loop type filler would work. I used a silk thread that blended into the background. The additional quilting seemed the answer. It took me about three minutes per block to stitch the additional texture.

Getting ready to block

The large brown border was the last section to quilt. Originally, I had envisioned feathers in this section or some extra large pebbles stitched in a pink 40 wt thread. . . the quilt didn't want that plan. I decided to repeat quilting straight lines. The quilt was happy with that decision! Again, repeating what I did in the inner brown sashing made this decision work well.

I laid it on the floor expecting a lot of bumps and wonkiness; but, it wasn't bad. It actually measured fairly close to 89 inches square. There were a few lumps. Because I am unable to be on the floor more than a few minutes and because I no longer have floor space large enough for a quilt this size, I decided to steam the lumps on half of the quilt as that was the amount that will fit on the floor. I repeated the process several hours later with the other side.

Measuring it after most of the lump removal revealed the quilt was still about 89 inches square. I'm moving on to the binding, sleeve and label.