Hand Quilting Itajime Piece

This morning I finally got a date for my surgery after the insurance folks tried every delay in the book. It's scheduled for the third week of October.  Meanwhile, I'm trying to finish up a piece to enter in an upcoming show. Sometimes I have so many ideas on how I can do that and sometimes not a one. Something I find helpful to do is to lay a clear transparency over the piece and use water soluble markers to plan a design. Then if I don't like it, I can erase and try another one. Below is a picture showing this.

To figure out what thread would be best, I audition a variety of them on top of the quilt, unspooling a couple yards of each. I decided on Sulky variegated long staple cotton 12 weight threads. 

Finishing a UFO

    Sorry I haven't posted in awhile.  My back pain, sciatica is quite uncomfortable and painful, so am spending a lot of time in bed with knees bent over a wedged pillow. I am reading a lot.

    I saw my neurosurgeon on September 8th and now am I'm waiting to get the authorization from Workers Comp for my back surgery.  I'm really looking forward to getting this done and moving on!!

    I've attached a photo of a quilt I started quite some time ago, and pulled out of one of my piles of ufos to distract me if nothing else as I wait to get surgery.  It was from a guild sponsored class by Judy Cisneros called Circles Pizzaz that I took in February of 2016. In fact I wrote a post about the class. She was a very good teacher. There's not an easy seam in it.  It was a good project to help me with learning about sewing curves. Each seam is like easing in a sleeve. I've been working off and on with it, mostly off, as I can't sit for more than 10 minutes at a time, sometimes not even that. The background is not a pure black, there is a small light grey print on it that doesn't show in this photo.  Kind of fun to do something so different than my usual stuff.