baby quilt progress

 

 I've been working on this one for months.  It's a baby quilt for my friend's daughter, who was born in early May.  It's a friend I've been out of touch with, so I got the news he had a daughter about a month after she was born.  The piecing part went pretty quickly, but I decided to hand-quilt it (my first time) and I wanted the stitches to be part of the overall design, so I'm using a light pink double-thread.  I'm also a bit of a perfectionist, and I wanted the stitches to look good, so it's taking a looooooong time.  One of these squares takes several hours to quilt.

 

Here I am on my second-to-last square.  That's the progress I had as of last night.  It's nice to always have a bit of hand-stitching to do while watching a movie or a show.  We watched "Life After People" last night, a History Channel special that theorizes on how the earth will naturally reclaim our cities if people suddenly vanished, giving snapshots at various passages of time: 3 days, 1 month, 3 years, 30 years, 250 years, etc... The narrator is comically over-dramatic and sometimes the things they talk about are completely uninteresting (the British royal corgis?  Are we worried about this?), but the visual effects they use to illustrate the projected deterioration and the collapse of major metropolitan landmarks are amazing.  My favorite is the 30-year mark.  Apparently there actually are cities all over the world that were vacated in the late 70s and left to decay; the producers of the show use these as a real-life benchmark of what to expect, showing how the elements have ravaged buildings that were once sound structures.  In the episode we saw, Gary, Indiana was used as an example.  (You're singing the song to yourself now, aren't you?  Sorry about that.)

Oh yeah... back to the quilt.  I have just one more square to quilt before I can bind it and hand it off.  Keep your fingers crossed this happens before baby's first birthday.