One Monthly Goal - April

 In March, I set a fairly lofty goal for myself to quilt the Marvel Quilt. Broken down. I misread the date for the end of month link-up, so I'll recap here and then move on to my April Goal.  Quilting the Marvel quilt was a three step goal. Baste the quilt - which I finished on or about March 2nd, plan the quilting, and execute the quilting.  I achieved about 80% of my goal, so while I didn't finish, I did make progress.

I am in the midst of the String and Story Free Motion quilting class, so trying to juggle practicing new motifs with the rest of my life and meeting goals. Thus, while I spent a lot of time deciding on motifs, as this is a great opportunity to practice, I didn't actually start the quilting until March 30th.

By the evening of March 31st, I had quilted square spirals in all the large blocks, spirals in most of the background sashing, and finished 10 of the 15 stars.

And quilted a corner of the backing onto the quilt when I turned a corner. I need to break this tradition of stopping to pluck out these mistakes. Thus far, I've been able to fix all of these (3 so far on three different quilts) by cutting off the offending fabric and carefully teasing out the excess with tweezers. One of these days I'm not going to be so lucky. I caught myself and stopped further tragedies at least twice more while I was quilting the borders this weekend.

I sat for a long time on Saturday staring at the quilt. I knew I wanted to use square spirals in the black border, but I wasn't certain about the red inner border. Part of it was just the dread of working my way around the quilt twice. I toyed with the idea of leaving that border unquilted, but wasn't sure if there would be batting bunching up. I though about using tiny squares on the red next to the big squares. Eventually I decided on a loopy meander. And it wasn't so bad after all maneuvering the quilt.

My goal for April is to finish the Marvel quilt. Three steps to y goal: 1. Finish quilting the body and borders (complete as of April 3). 2. Trim the quilt. 3. Prepare, apply, and stitch on the binding.

I am confident that I will finish this time. I am also really glad that I pushed myself as far as I did in March. If I had not had the goal in mind, I likely would not have started the quilting when I did.

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