Boustrophedon: Curves Ahead

 There were so many obstacles to my finishing this quilt, I wondered how I would be able to get it completed in time. First, my sewing room was dismantled toward the end of July after a plumbing catastrophe. The leak was discovered in April, and since then, we've been plagued by slow insurance adjusters and slow contractors. It's been very frustrating. 

When the prompt was announced at the beginning of August, we already had plans to leave on a two-month road trip. Our return wasn't expected until October 17th, and so there was just a small window of time for me to work on it. I decided my best bet was to hand embroider something while we were on the road, and then finish it upon our return. My hand embroidery was inspired by this image created by "ndgmtlcd." I've contacted him or her. I don’t know if “ndgmtled” is a man or a woman, but in any case, I’m using the image with permission. I'm grateful to "ndgmtled" for allowing me to adapt it for my purposes. 

I had some ideas about how to make it work for the prompt, and so I traced it onto a background fabric and went to work hand-stitching. This is my finished quilt. Mine is a literal interpretation of the prompt. It measures 15 x 18 inches.

Here's how it looks from the back. The backing fabric was a gift from a friend. It's a Kaffe Fassett fabric, called "Sharks Teeth." I cut it into three strips and faced the "teeth" in opposite directions.

Since my sewing room was still dismantled upon our return, I set up a temporary sewing space specifically to finish this quilt. I added the two borders to the quilt top, sticking with the "cow" theme. How could I resist using that Holstein fabric? It was some I picked up while traveling in Wisconsin...the "dairy state." Here's my little temporary sewing space.

When the top was finished, I added the batting and then used one of the fancy stitches on my sewing machine to add some machine stitching and quilting, filling out the design.

For that, I stitched just through the batting before adding the back, 

and then just lightly quilted it with some straight-line quilting.

The hand embroidery was tiny. In the image below, I've added my thimble for scale.

After completing the quilting, it was ready for binding.

And one more time...here is my finished quilt. I hope you like it. I had fun making it despite all the challenges.

With so many challenges, I decided to call my quilt "Curves Ahead."