Borders and Stripes - Hand Quilting Begins

I don't know how this happened, but it was definitely not the initial plan for this quilt.  After scrapping the initial plan to machine quilt it then spending the last few days taking out about a large section of machine quilting this is the final plan:

Hand quilting Borders and Stripes.  For the straight line hand quilting, I marked small sections with masking type to make sure the lines are straight.

Yep that's right - I'm hand-quilting!  I haven't hand quilted a quilt for a few months now.  I guess I miss it.  As much as I like the convenience and results of machine quilting, there is nothing like hand quilting.  It looks different, it feels different, and it gives a quilt a very nice old fashioned custom look. 

Borders and Stripes piecing was very simple - consisting of strips of different fabrics.  After doing a little machine on it, I soon realized that it was not the right approach for this quilt.  I'm still not 100% sure what kind of quilting pattern I want on the whole quilt but I am confident that hand quilting was the right thing.

So far I have 3 straight lines quilted - and about 50 more to go.  I'm going to be doing the straight line on all the solid browns.  I used a off-white thread to match the backside of the quilt.  My goal is to always use thread that is the same color as the backside. 

For the Borders fabric I did an outline of the flowers and stems (Bryant Park fabric).  There's 3 Borders strips so I'm about 20% done with that part.  Here's a closeup of a Border strip:

Doesn't show up too well in the photo, but it's a pretty discrete hand quilted outline around each flower and stem on the Bryant Park fabric.  This is creating a very nice look and feel to the quilt.  A lot more work to do but I am liking the results a lot.

 The back side of the floral hand quilting.  Loving it.

One of the goals of doing this type of hand quilting is to preserve the look of this pretty fabric.  Here's a closeup of the fabric before quilting.  I didn't want any quilt lines to take away from the overall look and feel of the design.

 A look at the fabric before the quilting.

This has been a lot of work...and a lot more to do.  But I do love the results of hand quilting.