Christmas Quilt-a-long Year 2 August Day End

After lunch I decided to do a bit of quilting on the quilt frame.  I have the second baby clothes quilt, the first of which I called Blessings from Heaven, all loaded and ready to go on the quilt frame.

This quilt is bigger than the other one.  It's measuring 90"x91" and that's bigger than I remembered.  I did a nontraditional scallop as the binding treatment on the first quilt which made the full size quilt more useful on a twin sized bed.  And as it was only my second quilt I stitched the entire thing stitch in the ditch. But this one is another matter.  Because I knew I wouldn't be putting scallops on this one I did a different border treatment all together.

So it starts with a small 2" outermost border which I have been quilting like this unununun (minus the serifs) The next is a border of 3" blocks those I spend a while thinking of how to quilt and came up with hearts that chain loop from one into the other at the bottom.  Once I got the hang of those they turned out nicely.  Finally is the final border that finishes off all of the sashing.  Each intersection has a hand embroidered heart so I have been quilting feathers between the hearts and a doubling back to make an inner and outer heart through the embroidery.  So far I'm pretty happy with it.  There are some mild puckers and so forth on the top as the knits aren't properly interfaced - hey I told you this was a duplicate of my second quilt and made at the same time so why else do you think I've put off quilting it for two years?  To deal with the puckers that I knew would happen to some degree the batty is a lofty 3/4" so hopefully when washed it will be nice and cuddly and at that point I'll just have to just say who cares, right?

Currently I'm in a holding pattern because it's time to start quilting the blocks.  The quilt is so big that the sheer number of wraps around the rails wont allow me access to quilt any single entire block at one time.  I had planned big loops within the heart blocks but as I only have access to about half the bottom of block I'm not sure how to proceed.  If I work with it ignoring what I can't quilt yet I'll end up with way to many starts and stops.  Which leads me to my other thought of simply picking an all over pattern and quilting that within each block.  Does anyone have any other ideas?  Feel free to throw them out, because this is only the second quilt I've done on my mid arm so I'm a bit bamboozled.

Tiny was so excited when I got up to post to you that I just had to share this picture of her.  She must have wanted me to come in the sewing room because now she's sleeping behind the sewing machine.

Hopefully everyone had a great Christmas Quilt-a-long Day.  I know I did.