Bad Batting, Bad

I had a hard time choosing what kind of quilting pattern to do for Joy. My initial thought was to mimic all the plaid lines and do some kind of straight lines on the quilt. You can see the problems I ran into trying to mark lines. Pokey, Pokey, Pokey.

I quilted a partial line and realized that no, that just wasn't going to work - too many straight lines. Maybe a crosshatch would be better, but since I want to minimize crossing seams that wasn't going to help much. So then I tried my old standby of freehand fans. Quickly realized that wasn't doing anything since most of the fans would disappear amidst all the busy fabric.

In the purple border I decided to do a fun spirally pattern that I learned from Gwen Marston. I've never seen it in one of her books, but she used it on the adorable purple Christmas Tree quilt in Ladies' Circle Patchwork and Quilting sometime in the early '90s. There are spirals growing out of a center vine - I like how it looks. This is 3 strands of embroidery floss and a honking big needle:

Now one thing complicating matters is that I bought a quilting batt that I'd never used before. My LQS had run out of Quilter's Dream Request so I thought, could the Quilter's Dream Select be all that different? It's a 70% cotton blend rather than pure cotton but shouldn't that make it even easier to quilt through? HA!

For hand quilting, the Select is horrific. Never, ever will I do this again. It hurts to pull the needle through and I'm too stubborn to just stab stitch. I was having such a hard time pulling the needle through that I bought balloons to help grab onto the needle. I just cut one in half and stuck the top end on my thumb. Homemade finger cot. 

It's actually very hard to take a photo one-handed esp when using your non-dominant hand. 

Anyway, you can also use a whole balloon as a needle grabber. Putting it on my thumb just saves effort. I'm also wearing one of my beloved Handeze gloves, which work great at reducing wrist fatigue. You can get them at JoAnn's and Michaels over with the embroidery floss.

I'm going to tack the rest of the quilt, haven't decided exactly how yet. 

Pokey and Bibi were both making me nuts this morning while I was trying to quilt. It's hard to be a single catmom.

Switching over to geekiness. Did ya'all watch the 4th episode of Dollhouse? I thought it was a big improvement and the series has gotten much more interesting. Though of course there are those niggling questions. Why would you ever get a Doll to be a midwife? Unless there was some kind of unmentioned skullduggery, it seems rather pointless not to mention overly expensive. So I'd rather that episode a B. Maybe with a minus. Really looking forward to the next couple of episodes.

I really need to stop reading TV By the Numbers. It depresses the hell out of me. Dollhouse may make it through one season but is doubtful for pickup next year, Terminator: Sarah Connor is doing terribly in the ratings and is likely to be cancelled. And why is it that Chuck is even in danger of not getting renewed? That is such a fun show, why would the network cancel it?

So speaking of tv, I am going to give Castle a try tonight. It sounds completely unoriginal, but hey, I do love mysteries and Nathan Fillion (Firefly's Capt Mal Reynolds) is a hoot, so what the heck. Here's a review of the first episode by Televisionary.