Machine quilting

It is HOT here in Japan!  And humid!  I really dislike this type of weather...  No use complaining about it though so on to a post.

Yesterday school got suddenly canceled... which wasn't a surprise.  Covid numbers have been increasing and last week 3rd graders and 6th graders had no school because someone in those classes had Covid.  After a three day weekend, I went to the crosswalk yesterday morning but the groups that came to school were very small.  I wasn't home an hour before the school called to say that more children in their classes were absent with Covid and so the principal declared that school was canceled and we would all be entering summer vacation three days early.  Well, I had found it hard to walk to the school in the heat anyway and already resorted to driving the short distance...  We will see how things fare at the end of August when school starts again.

So my mornings now will allow us a sleep-in though the cats and John don't recognize summer vacation.  We need to start our morning walk before the heat anyway so it is for the best.  

My schedule will go as... take a 20 minute walk at the cemetery.  Come home to granola and yogurt.  Do some iPhone things like study Spanish, Bible devotional, correct some English sentences from my few students, do a quick Instagram post.  Supposedly I'm ready then to do some household chores though these days not much gets done...  And then I retire to the sewing room while Tetsu heads to the garden.  Both of us have to beat the heat while we can.  The garden gets too sunny and hot and the sewing room has no air-conditioning so by afternoon I am out of there!

Today I prematurely put on some binding to my latest quilt, thinking that this evening I'll hand sew it down in the air-conditioned living room, and then I worked on the machine quilting.

I've gone for mostly Stitch-in-the-Ditch around the applique shapes though I did add some definition to the few flowers in the quilt.  From there it has been to figure out how to quilt the rest of this...  I decided against stippling.

In the outer border with triangles I went back to a motif that I'm comfortable with.

Then there was the question of whether the thinner borders needed anything or not...  I could leave it as is...

The interesting difference between hand quilting and machine quilting is that with hand quilting you pretty much have to mark your quilt before you begin and it is hard to add marking with all the fluffiness when the quilt is in the hoop (I guess that's true only if you use a pencil and not a marking pen and stencil).  With machine quilting, I can add more quilting whenever I get the feeling that one section has less quilting than other sections...  Thus I find it hard to decide when my quilting is really done...  I added some spirals in the narrow border and then went for it in the second border too.

I had planned to leave the corners alone but they looked lonesome and so I added petals or leaves or something....

I will sew up the binding tonight and then think about whether this needs more quilting or not...

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Appropo of nothing...  Does anyone use Bloglovin' to view blogs?  I'm about ready to give up on it because it rarely lets me log in and even when it does it often tells me the website is down.  I begin thinking that they've shut down the website completely but then I'll suddenly be able to use it again...  Still, it seems very unreliable and I wondered if there are any other alternatives..  I'm finding it difficult to go blog visiting...