multi tasking

I had a "three quilt day" the other day. That's not to say that I finished three quilts, but I did make progress on each of them. The primary thing I wanted to accomplish was piecing backs and basting the two finished quilt tops. I had already cut batting to size and figured out the pieces for the backing, they have just been sitting waiting patiently for me to get to it. While I pieced both backs, I only basted one quilt, my little chickens that are going to London this month. 

Once I set up the sewing machine and ironing board and made the few lines I needed to get the backings pieced, I also brought out my french braid quilt from hibernation and made a little bit of progress on that. That was more appealing than putting everything away and clearing out a bunch of space to baste the large medallion quilt. I'll get to it. :) The braids were fun to start again and I can tell I'm going to enjoy playing with designing more of that quilt top as the year progresses. 

I spent a day or so looking for inspiration to get me going on quilting the chickens. I thought I wanted to do it on the machine but nothing was really striking my fancy that was simple enough. I've done some free motion quilting on small things to test it, but I'm not confident enough yet to risk it on a large project like this where I'd be really sad if it didn't look good. Straight lines were not inspiring me either, so I decided to hand quilt! I popped out to the store yesterday to grab a few colors of pearl cotton and got going last night.

It seems crazy, but this piece is not nearly as large as the (first and) last one I hand quilted so I'm hopeful it will go fast. Indeed, last night I outlined half of the blocks while watching an hour or so of tennis and I've already gotten another done this morning. I've got some plans for the sashing involving eggs and bird footprints. This is already so stinkin' cute, I can't wait to see how it looks when I'm done.