Quilting!! and a big win

The Big Green Monster (aka green modern Dresdens) has been on my machine for 5 days now.  The kids are safely off at school 7 hours a day and I am quilting more hours a day than I think I ever have to get this at least to a state that it can be safely removed.  Notice that I did not use the "done" word.  I won't even assume that I can finish it before the client quilts are piling up, but it does need to have the majority of the fill-work completed so it's adequately held together.

I discovered right off the bat that the green thread I had planned to use was too dark for the lime green outer border.  You'd think that I could have checked that sometime in the last month or so and ordered a lighter shade, eh?  Nope.  I figured it out the day I hoped to actually quilt the border.  Today, 4 days later, the paler green thread arrived.  I was not patient enough to wait, so I have to go back and quilt the basted border when I am done with the center.  Pray for no pleats.

So far, there are areas of the quilting that I love, and areas that I might raise an eyebrow and question why I thought that would be good.  I love the silk thread.  It.is.awesome.  Super.duper.awesome.  Want more, Santa...must have!  All 20 of the Dresdens will be quilted as below.  I have not done the pink center yet; will get after the rest is done.  The thread is a heavier-weight so I don't want to be constantly adjusting tension as I go back and forth between Glide and silk.  Note that I echo quilted 1/4" around the Dresden.  Looks nice, I think.

On day 3, though, I was so freaking gung-ho to test out a filler that I failed to outline the top center Dresden!  I could have screamed.  There's no way I am pulling out as much of this silk thread that would have to be removed to outline the plate, so the outlining is reserved just for the corners. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I'm using some fills that I have not really used on a competition quilt before.  I'm not really sure about the 1/2" curved-crosshatch.  It's nothing overly original.  I have seen it many times before on show quilts and liked it.  So, tell me why I don't love it here?.  It just seems like a lot of it.  I really wish I'd chosen some free-flowing feathers...except that when I designed the quilting for this quilt I wanted to avoid just putting feathers everywhere.  I want a variety of textures.  Fingers crossed.

Above you can see my "modified prairie points".  I'm a bit of a rebel.  I wanted to try them because they seemed era-appropriate for a Dresden quilt, and the triangles look great, but I couldn't get over the flaps flapping all over the place so I stitched them all down.  Prairie points no more.

There are 9 ivory blocks, and eight of them are exactly like this one.  The center is a little different.  It turned out really well.  The band of pebbles will create a sub-frame within the quilting.  I designed this, and actually traced the pattern onto all 8 blocks with a pen.  I am all about free-quilting feathers, but I really wanted uniformity for these.

Here's a fun fill I drafted for this quilt.  Those cross-hatched frames go up the diagonal of the quilt to frame the patch of 16 Dresdens on pointe.   This is 22 hours into a 102" quilt...maybe at the 30% completion mark.  Maybe.

I got word that my quilt Meet Me at Giverny shown here took a first place at the Wisconsin Quilt Expo!!  It sounds like the quilts there are really spectacular - hand and machine quilted both.  If you are in the Madison area, it's well worth a trip.