Penguin Progress

I've been struggling with this post most of the week. I have no idea why it's okay to write 8 posts on a shawl, but I'm feeling guilty about sharing progress on my Penguin Quilt  for the third week in a row. It both astonishes and confounds me how I can have such completely opposite approaches when it comes to knitting and quilting. With knitting I can only have one project at a time that I'm working on. (I've tried many times to have multiple projects going so that I have knitting no matter what mood I'm in, but it just doesn't work.) The closest I've come to writing my own knitting pattern is vanilla socks where I just check stitch counts for the heel. It's easy to show progress from one week to the next so I almost always have something to write about.

With quilting I can't even count how many quilts I have in the works right now. Since I have self-set deadlines and am working through how I'll finish them I'm calling them WIPs and not UFOs. I usually don't use a pattern, and if I do I alter it so much that it has very little resemblance to the quilt that inspired it. Progress however is very hard to show on a large quilt. I don't have a good way to hang a quilt in progress so all I can share is close-ups of the blocks. (When the blocks are 14" though it makes it hard to even get a decent shot of that.)

I've been busy working on quilting Penguins this week. I'm hoping to photograph it early next week so I've been pushing to finish it in time. This is only my second time doing free motion quilting and I wasn't prepared for how much thread it would take. Thankfully the Fat Quarter Shop has really fast shipping and I had a new spool of thread 3 days after ordering.

I have one large grey block, one fish, and two penguins left to quilt, and the binding so I should make my goal of finishing this weekend. I'm loving how the bubble quilting is looking. It really makes this quilt.