GWTW - forging onwards.

I'm so pleased that I've finally found my groove for quilting this quilt!  To be sure, there has been a LOT of rolling and re-rolling (but NOT Rickrolling!), advancing the quilt and backing it off .. just to be able to quilt in the areas that needed to be quilted.

BUT, I'm happy to say, at this point,

• the top & bottom borders of free-motion, meandering feathers have been done
• all the areas that contain the appliques have been stitched in the ditch
• all the appliques have been outline stitched and have curved, radiating lines emanating from the center.  These curved lines really accentuate the applique picture, rather like a spot-light.  I hope it looks as good when looking at the entire quilt as they do individually!
• some of the expanded figure-8 background fill has been done.  I'm sufficiently content with this design to keep it.
• all of the tails created from the NUMEROUS starts & stops (*so* annoying!) have been tied and buried

I got the idea of the radiating lines from this picture, which I found from a Google/Image search.

I chose curved, radiating lines for a softer look than the straight lines convey.  I was able to stitch the curved lines very nicely with the use of Linda Mae's Rays curved ruler.   I bought that specific ruler because you can not only do straight radiating lines but you can also do the curved lines.  The ruler has a handy hole at the center spot so you can anchor your ruler to a specific spot on the quilt.

Next up: continuous curves in the diagonal squares.  It would be *really* nice to be able to make one long diagonal pass for as along as there are squares to stitch, but practically speaking, that's not going to happen.  My workspace is about 12" deep, so the longest diagonal that I can do is about 17" before I need to tie off and bury the tail.

Take a look at the picture above (the one with the quilted radiating lines).  There's a set of 4 squares going in a southeast-to-northwest direction.  All of the squares in that direction can have the continuous curves quilted in one pass.

But the squares going in the southwest-to-northeast direction don't stop after four squares ... they continue on and on and on.  Those are the ones that I anticipate just a whole lot more rolling and re-rolling to get stitched.

My goodness, there is just no END to this quilt!  I don't think I'll be ever making this particular layout again!  :-)