Quilting, quilting, quilting - and a winner!

Did lots of work today - most of it quilting (though I did cut some pieces while talking to my mother on the phone). First, I finished quilting this baby quilt, and have attached the binding so I can sew it down. When I last saw the recipient, she had not yet had the baby, but there was always the weekend. Anyway, close enough! I didn't do anything fancy on this, just random lines crossing the quilt - was going to do diagonals across the blocks, but I thought that might be weird with the crazy nine-patches, so I just sewed a line for a while, then turned and sewed in another direction. It was kind of fun, actually.

So then I dropped the feeddogs and did FMQ on this (though actually, it occurs to me that while I changed the foot to the darning foot, I think I forgot to actually drop the feeddogs - can't say it made any difference, frankly, if anything, it might have worked better) - oh and what do you guys think, is it REALLY lazy of me to wish I had space enough to have a second machine which always had the feeddogs dropped and the hopping foot (or whatever) on it, so I didn't have to change back and forth when piecing/quilting? :)

Anyway, this is going really well - I quilted the black background quite densely, with a kind of sun meander. Each of the squares will have a little doodad like this one in the pink square in it, though there will be clay faces on top of them, so the centres won't show, only the edges. I've done the yellow diamonds with a kind of flame. The large pink parts in the centre will also have a similar meander to what's in the black. And not sure yet about the blue star points and the small outer pink triangles, but we'll see when I get to them. Had to stop because my wrists were beginning to ache, but I did more than I thought I could. I am finding it fairly slippery work, though, so I must look into either a hoop or grippy things or something - tried just using rubber washing up gloves, which works surprisingly well, though they make my hands hot. Anyone have a favourite tool for gripping the top surface of a quilt when doing FMQ?

OK, finally, the moment you are all waiting for. The Christmas blocks were pretty popular, but I am pleased to say that the lucky winner was commentor no 11 - otherwise known as Di. Di, send me your address and (when the postal strike decides to finish) I will put the blocks in the post for you.

Tomorrow (providing I remember what day of the week it is, of course) there will be a new giveaway - something a little different this time, but still fairly popular, I hope!