Hand Stitching Progress

I've been stitching my Shoo Fly Garden blocks for a few months now, so today felt like a good time to take them all out and see what I have. 

This is what the finished throw size quilt will eventually look like. Emphasis on eventually!

That's 154 flowers made of ½" hexies, hand stitched to their backgrounds and with black snowball corners machine stitched. I'm nowhere close to that yet!

So far, I have 15 finished blocks, plus another 2 that have half their corners sewn on. I've been using these as leaders and enders, doing one corner at a time as I've been doing other piecing.

I have another 25 flowers stitched to their backgrounds and awaiting corners. I'm using mostly tone-on-tone white fabrics for the backgrounds, with some solid white thrown in, too.

And I have another 23 flowers stitched together. Pinned to the design wall like this, they remind me of insect specimens 😆

That's a total of 65 flowers, so I'll still be basting and stitching these for a while yet! This is my travel project, though I've worked on it at home now and then, too, mostly while talking to my mom, Aiden, or Zach on the phone, or when we have company.

If you want to make a Shoo Fly Garden quilt of your own, the free tutorial is here.

My other big hand stitching project hasn't received as much attention this year, though I have made progress. I'm hand quilting my Hexie Rainbow using Aurifil 12 wt. thread and I'm now working on the last line of the yellow quilting. Each of the coloured rings of the rainbow gets four lines of quilting and the black rings get two lines of quilting, on the inside and outside edges of the hexies. This morning I set myself a mini goal of having this last line of yellow finished before the end of the year.

The black thread pretty much disappears into the black fabrics. The coloured threads are easier to see, though they still blend in on some of the fabrics.

All of the quilting shows up on the blue backing, though!

It's really hard to get a good picture, but I love how the rainbow is appearing on the back. The texture is fabulous, too!

Both projects are obviously not going to be finished anytime soon, which is fine by me. I'll keep picking away at them and it'll be fun to see where I am this time next year 😊