Love Endures progress

Today was the deadline to complete Love Endures. I didn't beat the deadline. It's sitting on the longarm frame and I'm almost half way through the quilting. Fair warning--LONG POST. Instead of blogging about this over the last month in several posts, I kept adding to this one. 

David and I plodded along on the project. Scheduling time to work on it was an issue--I was determined at the onset of the project that David should do the majority of the work on the quilt while I would be the shepherd! It's largely worked out that way but I have done quite a bit of the work and all of the quilting. David has made all the design decisions while accepting a few suggestions from Jack and me. Here is the progress as of about a month ago:

Some closeups:

This is a lousy photo of the fabric used for the lake. David picked this one out because he wanted it to somewhat reflect the night sky. This particular fabric has been in my stash for 19 years--I used it as a background in my (unfinished) Lone Cabin quilt that I hope to complete next year. Here's one of the mountain range; think "purple mountains' majesty":

And a closeup of the lake shoreline:

And the tent that needs lots of definition!

David also made the border choices. The border will be 6" wide and we'll applique a quote around the entire border. David made some additional design changes . . . I keep thinking about all of the thread that's going on this quilt!

Next on the quilt will be Alice in Wonderland propped up against a tree reading "To Kill a Mockingbird." I found an image of a first edition opened up and will have it on Alice's lap. 

The following week we finally had Alice propped up against the tree with her book and had the campfire in place. I had the borders and the quote on it by the end of that week.

As stated in my last post, I had fully intended to spend all of the weekend before last quilting it. The hubster helped me load it onto the longarm last Tuesday night. Wednesday I chose not to work on it because I was beat--during the government shutdown, I was excepted personnel and had spent 16 days taking care of several other co-workers' duties in addition to some of my own. And on Thursday when everyone returned to work, I received the news about Aunt Bettye, and put off the quilting to be with our family.

So Thursday and Friday were mental health days and I quilted all day long both days. Here are some closeups of the quilting.

So tonight was the one-year anniversary of David and Emma's first date. David made dinner for Emma, and brought her over to our house for dessert. David took Emma down to the Bottoms Up! Studio and showed her the quilt on the frame. She loved it! I waited about 10 minutes before showing up in the studio. I feel badly about not finishing it on time, but David was very understanding considering all that happened this month and I hope to finish it by next weekend.

The next time you see this quilt it will be completed, and I'll share a little bit about my quilting process. I hope to quilt a little bit each night this week as well as this weekend.

Have a great week!