A little quilting

The time had arrived to start the quilting on my Compass quilt. The fabric to make this quilt was a Christmas  present from John in 2016. The fabric arrived in early January but by this point I had already been diagnosed with breast cancer and I said the quilt was my rescue quilt and making it would be the journey back to health . In many ways it was a rescue quilt and it was a new project to work on but a project that seemed at the time to be very complicated. I think that was the effect of the chemotherapy. My poor brain found the pattern quite confusing to follow but this was due to the tiredness, which was worse since I continued working throughout the treatment. Having said that, I found the quilt top very satisfying to make and celebrated as I added each border.  Yesterday I started the quilting on the centre of the quilt, the compass panel. 

I stitched around the points of the compass and then did a small meander in the area between the points. At then set the quilt aside for the day as it is a large quilt and also heavy to manoeuvre under the sewing machine. In addition I haven't quilted anything large in a long time and I found the concentration needed tired my eyes. 

Today I continued and quilted the square around the compass with a pebble pattern.

This is where I stopped the quilting for the day. Tomorrow John and I are planning on walking so there will be no time to do any more quilting but I'll do the next section on Saturday. Apart from walking Scamp I'm awarding myself a 'nothing but sewing day' on Saturday. By then I'll have decided how I want to quilt the next section. The whole quilting process is just one decision after another!

Once I'd packed my quilting away for the day we took Scamp for a walk across the common. It has been a warm and sunny day here in London so I took my camera with me. On the walk to the common there were several trees in flower, not sure what they are but they are very pretty.

On the common the Ash had their black leaf buds and cluster of flower buds.

A magnolia tree was in bloom

And in one of the trees two magpies just sat and watched the world pass by. We usually see a lot of magpies on the common but today these were the only ones about.

John and I celebrated the sun with an ice cream, it was so good. This evening I did a little more stitching on Abigail whilst watching TV.  For now I'm off to bed.

Lyndsey