I recently posted on using gold straight stitches to hand applique joined strips of fabric scraps, https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=5758 and mentioned making a 40cm x 40cm piece – which I finished today. Yay!!!

To machine quilt black on black between the bands of colour, I chose a thread with dull finish to make it as unobtrusive as possible – which of course means that the lines of quilting MOL invisible! But it is there, and when I take it and the next one to my photographer, Eduardo Baldizan, in a few weeks’ time, I’m sure he’ll capture some close up detail at a dazzling number of pixels resolution.

I know many art quilters do have several pieces in progress at any time, rather as painters do, but it’s not normal for me to start another until I’ve reached the final hand sewing stage of either binding or facing, and the hanging sleeve. With more than one piece under construction, I find moving from one work to another distracting. If I get really stuck and can’t move on, I have been known to take something down off the wall, put it and those fabrics away completely out of sight before working on the next.