Monster Quilt Progress

I thought I'd keep today's post reasonably short for two reasons: (1) the last one was so long, you're probably STILL reading it, and (2) I spent a good part of the time I would normally have spent quilting and posting on the phone with my brother, telling him all about our adventures in Oroville with my weird mom on Saturday. Just a taste of what he has to look forward to at the end of the month when he goes up there and helps her move. If I tell you he's thrilled, you'll know I'm a big, fat liar, right?!

And thank you for your kind, supportive comments. They're much appreciated! We can't control what other people do, and my brother and I decided a long, long time ago to try our best not to let my mom's words and actions bother us any more than necessary. Really, they're kind of the subject of dark humor, and I think that's our way of coping. I don't know if you read my post quite awhile back about a registry of people who shouldn't be given quilts, but I made one for my mom and mailed it to her as a late Christmas gift and she never acknowledged it. When my parents were in the accident and I was up there a lot, I learned my mom had just folded it up and stored it in a box in the closet. My brother and I were joking tonight that maybe it's a good thing after all since it wasn't sold along with everything else in the house!

Anyway, buried somewhere in yesterday's post, I mentioned getting a few photos of the progress of the monster quilt. First I'll post the one you've no doubt seen already of the unquilted top, just for reference so you don't have to click over to somewhere else to figure out what I'm talking about:

Now this is where I'm at--see those sections in the top with the flying geese, stars, and sky? The first photo shows a bit of that section. The second photo shows the same section but catches some of one of the corner trees.

I'm just working on the first side--three more to go after I finish this one. These sections I'm quilting now stop where I've outlined the blue pieces--they look like a string of blue beads to me, so let's call them that. I'll need to go back and quilt the "sky" section on the outside of those beads and quilt something in the centers of the beads as well. All of the grass and fence sections are done as are the four corner trees. So, I'm getting there--slowly but surely!

By the way, my online group is called Quilters' Hollow, and I think that's what I'm going to name this monster quilt--or maybe Quilters' Hollow Retreat. Since the outside star blocks and all the smaller house blocks were the result of swaps the group participated in, it seems like a good name for it.

The other thing I wanted to mention that has absolutely nothing to do with this quilt is that I've read some blogs where people have mentioned having a hard time adding a title--Blogger's not letting them click into the title field. I've finally figured out that if you click where it actually says "Title," it seems to take you to that field. Hope this helps!

Now I'm going to go into the Sweat Shop and quilt a little bit more--even if I don't have a lot of time tonight, I'll be that much further along tomorrow!