First Meeting finally finished!

This was on my list of UFOs to work on this week. It's been in the bottom of my current project pile for months. I thought I was finished with it last year, but my husband (the man who is represented in the picture and the future owner of the quilt) requested that I add some words to the plain brown unquilted borders. Since this was a little out of my comfort zone I have been doing some major procrastination about it, and since he hasn't asked where the quilt was....it just wasn't getting finished. But it was causing me a great deal of guilt every time I would look at my pile. So today was the day I decided to tackle it!

I could not believe how much I actually enjoyed the process of figuring out how to add the words and achieving the effect I wanted. At first I thought I would make a rectangle like an engraved label and cut the letters out, letting the brown show through. After booting up EQ7 and playing for a bit I decided to applique the letters directly to the border using some kind of gold colored fabric. I then went into the sewing room looking for the right fabric. I dug through my stash for a few minutes, then my eye landed on a rolled fat quarter of gold satin that was given to me by a friend. Perfect! Well, maybe. First I had to test out a couple of letters to see if it was practical to fuse and applique satin letters. To my suprise, it worked out pretty well. I wouldn't do it on something that would get a lot of wear, but this is a wall-hanging, so the tendency to fray won't matter much.

I spent a pleasant hour or so tracing and fusing, cutting, then fusing again and was thrilled at the results. I then loaded up my machine with some silk thread and stitched around the letters. I then drew an outline around my letters to look like an engraved plaque. That's the point where I took the picture. After this I added some stitching that looks like wood grain on the rest of the brown border. I did some more stitching on the body of the quilt, fixing my husbands hair so it's not so white, and adding some white to the horse's rear foot. Now I just have to sew the hanging sleeve on and it is finished! I'm so happy to get this done - no more guilt, and my husband will have his quilt to hang in his office.

Maybe next time I won't procrastinate so much about doing something I'm not confident with. After all, doing something badly is better than never doing anything at all!

Happy Sewing!