Sweet Surrender in the Frame!

One of my August goals was to get Sweet Surrender marked and into the hand quilting frame. I did meet that goal and the quilting has started.

Because someone always asks, I no longer have the Sweet Surrender pattern. I do NOT know where you can buy the pattern.  Sue Cody is the designer and owns the copyright on the pattern. She is no longer releasing it for publication. As far as I know, it is not available anywhere. Sorry, but that's the way it is so please don't ask me where to buy the pattern. Do your own search.

This is a large quilt, 92" by 104". I made my quilt larger than the original pattern. 

The pattern called for an applique border but I just couldn't do one more bit of applique for this quilt. Instead I chose to add a white border with a vine/leaf/flower stencil design. 

I will be quilting the design with #12 Sulky colored threads, hopefully it will show nicely. I did toss the idea around of embroidering the design in the border. 

An embroidered border would have been lovely, but I just couldn't stand the thought of wadding the quilt up in my lap while embroidering. If only I had though of it before I added the outside borders, no way I was going to take them off now.

On the center of the quilt, I marked 1/2" away from the diagonal seam lines on both sides. I followed this line into the white background of the applique.

On the darker fabrics I used a white Sewline chalk marker. On the light fabrics I marked with a Paper Mate Sharpwriter #2 mechanical pencil. I'm using a variegated white/silver thread for quilting the diagonal lines.

I'll be stitching in the ditch around all the applique using white YLI hand quilting thread. I will also stitch in the ditch the seamline between the rows.

In my opinion, wool batting is the way to go for hand quilting. I've always used a Hobbs Heirloom Premium wool batt, I buy them when they're on sale from Connecting Threads. During the last sale, I purchased a Hobbs Tuscany Collection wool batt. 

The problem with the heirloom premium batts is when they are folded then shoved in the plastic bag, it make bulges and pulls part of the batt out of shape. It can be a challenge to quilt those bulges. 

The Tuscany batt was folded nicely into a square and when I unfolded it, there wasn't one bulge pulled out of shape! I'm loving this batting already!

The backing is whole cloth fabric I purchased at Calico Point. That's where I buy my whole cloth backings. 

This quilt will be in the frame all autumn and most of the coming winter. I take my time when hand quilting, speed is not an option. Eventually this quilt will be gifted to one of the grandchildren when they're an adult.

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I wrote the above post earlier in August when I got Sweet Surrender into the quilting frame.

The scrappy square border under the quilted white border is quilted diagonally. I'm not quilting the seam line between the blocks, I like the way it puffs. I also stitched in the ditch on both sides of the narrow white border and the bottom of the wider white border.

I really like how the colored thread looks in the flower border. The colored thread doesn't show up well in the picture but it does in real life.

Linking to Peacock Party, Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching, Oh Scrap, Bambi's Show & Tell Monday, Monday Making, Design Wall Monday, BOM's Away, Moving It Forward, WIPs On Wednesday