Back of the Quilt

You know how I was saying that quilting stitches on the back of my quilts don't look like the ones on the front? Well here's a great example. This is the back of the quilt I showed you yesterday. When I did this, I had ten years of hand quilting experience, so my stitches were going through much better than they did when I first began.

Some stitches are little dots and others are missing entirely. You can see the longer stitches, some of which are backstitches or maybe where I've stabstitched to get through the seams.

The only difference with how I quilt now is the knots. I was determined for many many years that there was no reason to pull the knots through. I've finally realized that it would be too easy for those knots to get worn off after many years, although I've had no problems so far. So I do pull the knots through now, but I do it through the backing, not the top layer of the quilt.

As far as the crease on the quilt goes, I'll wait til we get to Paris to wash it. I'm afraid all of the quilts I've had hanging up here are full of the fine sand/dust of Cairo. I'll cross my fingers that does the trick. I usually have all my quilts laying flat or scrunched, so this is the first time I've had this problem.

I do wash all my quilts after I've finished them. I throw them in the washing machine on the gentle/handwash cycle and then into the dryer on the low setting, taking them out when they're still a bit damp so that I can block them. Not serious blocking with pins and measuring, but I do lay them flat and that does a great job.

On a completely different topic, I've now switched to Bloglines and I do recommend it for reading blogs. I hated waiting for the email from Blogarithm. Bloglines updates all the time, although you can see an occasional glitch where it misses a post or two.

To try and answer some comments. (Okay, these are from way back when, but I explained about the jumbly brain).

Tazzie, I have no idea why the tablecloths smell like gasoline. Something to do with the process of making them - I just know they stink.

Eileen, it's a fairly dry heat generally, at least in the summer. As far as I'm concerned, October is the worst weather month here - it's stickier and they burn the fields so the air pollution is horrendous. I'm thrilled to miss it this year.

The other day the temp was 95 and humidity was 43% and I was whining like crazy. I have the Mozilla Firefox browser and I put the weather plug-in on so now I can find out that kind of info easily. for instance, today's high is supposed to be 95 degrees and euwwww the humidity is expected to hit a high of 53 percent. Gross, I need to go run errands today (since I don't have a car, that means walking) so I've gotta get going now.