Finally Finished Tea Towel Challenge 2014 Quilt

Hoo boy, this has been a long time coming. I finally finished the Tea Towel Challenge 2014 quilt!

I had the flimsy sewn together way back in May 2014.  Nevertheless, at long last, here is the whole enchilada.  Quilted, bound, and hung on the wall last evening, right before the trick-or-treaters started ringing the doorbell.

I was a little stumped as to how to quilt it (it waited a year and a half...ya think?), but once I decided to finally put my nose to the grindstone, I knew it would require a bit of quilting in the ditch for starters.  So that's where I began.  

As things proceeded, I started to get a better inkling about the quilting.  I'd scribble down ideas as they occurred to me.  Funny how that usually happened while I was in the middle of something less than creative, namely my day job. 

Some doodles worked, others not so much.  It's why they make seam rippers.  Thankfully, there wasn't a whole lot of stitch-picking, just here and there. 

In the end, I determined that, overall, less was more with the quilting.  I didn't want to cover up those chickens in the center of the tea towel with anything that would detract, so I followed a lot of the black outlines around the chickens and then filled in with quilted scallops, squiggles, lines, and loops to approximate feathers, etc.

I sewed some tiny yellow beads in the chicken breast areas, for lack of a better idea how to quilt that particular space.  And just for kicks, I put a bead in the center of each eye as well.   The beads make me smile! 

For the quilting in the eight orange and green blocks in the outer border, I used a few different shapes characteristic of George Briard designs:  Spirals, leaves, diamonds, and an orange peel kind of thing (click to enlarge).

The feathers/leaves were loopy quilted.  A close meander filled in the yellow background around them.

I'm definitely doing the happy dance about this finish—with Sarah and the gang at Can I Get a Whoop Whoop!