Machine-ish quilting

I huge thank you to my commenters who encouraged me to just go ahead and quilt this on my domestic machine.  I got it set up, quilted a row, discovered that my stitches weren't particularly even, but weren't particularly awful, when this happened...

First Scout discovered this on the table, then Angry Bob discovered it, then Sam discovered it, and then I decided that this will never be finished if I have to continually move cats from it.  I'm giving up for now, but will make a good solid attempt at finishing this in the future.

Time to use the machine

I hate to refer to this as a practice quilt, but that is basically what it is becoming.  I've decided to try to quilt this on my home machine and it is probably foolish to make my first attempt at quilting with such a large quilt, but I have a devil may care attitude and will not be stopped.  I'm just going to do straight lines with my walking foot.  Now that I have it all pinned, it looks to be a rather daunting task and I'm kind of tempted to unpin it and rent the long arm instead.  I'll have to take a look at it tonight and see how I feel.  Sigh.  I feel like an inadequate quilter if I won't know how to do this at home, yet, it doesn't seem that interesting to me to do this at home.  Yup, kind of talking myself out of doing this at home now! 

At least I have Angry Bob's moral support to help me through this decision.

Baby Love Quilt - Completed

I don't think there are words to express how frustrating I find binding a quilt is.  There are simply no words.

Dungeness Spit

Yesterday was the first hike of the year and it was, in theory, an easy one.  Dungeness Spit is an 11 mile round trip hike out on a bird sanctuary to the lighthouse at the end.  It isn't unusual to see seals playing in the kelp by the lighthouse and large freighters in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  We saw both.  And, yes it was cool, but at least there was a breeze.  

The business of binding

The dangers of binding a quilt with a flannel back are now very apparent to me.  Scout has decided that this is great and will not leave it.  I will clearly have to make her one of her own. I have the binding added to one side of the quilt and I now need to flip it over and sew it to the other side.  Some quilters - those who care about their final product - will tell you that you should hand sew the final side.  I really am not interested in doing this unless there is a machine involved, so I will be machine sewing both sides.  I know, I know, when did we as a society get so lazy? 

In other cat news, Scout's veterinarian convinced me to enter her photo in their pet photo contest.  It raises money for local animal charities so it seems to be a good idea.  This photo is the one I've chosen for her.  I like how she looks slightly annoyed.  I'll also be submitting one of these photos to the catsonquilts.com website to see if I can increase their fame.