Cotton Candy Quilt Finished!

My Guild's semi-annual Quilt Show is April 8 and 9.  We're to deliver our quilts on April 6.  So I am working right down to the wire.  Of the four quilts I am entering, two have been hanging in our house for over a year.  But two are brand new.  Cotton Candy is what I am calling this pink quilt, which will be sent later in April to a baby girl named Bridget who lives in Virginia.  I usually have my good friend and super-expert quilter, Judy Steward, quilt my quilts for me for compensation.  Cotton Candy, however, was not pieced in time for Judy to quilt it.  So with much fear and trepidation, I did the machine quilting in the quilt's center, and then did some hand-quilting in the wide borders, using Perle cotton and the so-called "big stitch" or "utility stitch."   I did this quilting randomly, going around most of the motifs in the border fabric.  I've done the stitch before, in a baby quilt for one of our grandsons, and learned that it is much faster and easier to do than the traditional quilting stitch.  Too, it is easier on arthritic hands!

Here are some pictures of Cotton Candy:

Here's Cotton Candy, pinned to my design wall.  All that's lacking
is for me to steam it, to encourage it to hang straight and flat, and attaching
the hanging sleeve and a label.

A close-up showing both the machine stitching in the quilt center
and the big stitch hand-quilting with Perle cotton thread #8.  When you click to
enlarge, you'll see a "B" that I have embroidered in the bottom
border; this is for Bridget, the baby girl who will be
receiving this quilt soon.



Here you can see that in the pale pink setting triangles in this quilt
which has its block set "on point," I used a machine
serpentine stitch around the edges of the setting triangles.

Here you can see in a closer view the straight-line machine
stitching that I did, with two lines of stitching in each small block, zig-zagging across the width
of the quilt.