Why it takes me a while to get a job done

 I have been working away on the baby quilt. here you see the three "bookshelves" each arranged with toys and books made out of fabrics that had belonged to the new baby's recently deceased grandmother.

My lovely client helpfully sent me a file filled with photos of toys and books that really mattered to my client and to her brother in their childhood so this quilt wouldn't be filled with images of generic childhood toys and books but with toys and books that truly mattered to them.

As I have worked I have gone back to the list again and again.  Creating  this book cover

was so time-consuming that I wasn't dying to attempt another detailed book cover.

As I consulted the picture file one more time I realized that I had not yet tackled the Lionel trains. My client and her brother had spent lots of time with their father's Lionel trains.   I had kind of assumed that I could simply create a stylized traintrack, like this

Clearly, I did not grow up with Lionel trains (always a small regret of mine) but Lionel trains look like this. 

They are three metal tubes connected by a black bracket.

The engine my client included in the file was black. I have been creating everything on the quilt out of fabrics that had belonged to the woman who was being remembered in this quilt. ( Well, except for Felix the Cat )

I kept looking and looking at images of Lionel trains and tracks. I finally realized that I could construct a Lionel train track out of silver metallic cord and black ribbon for the ties.

Luckily, my striped denim tablecloth was on the kitchen table. I used the stripes as my folding guide for the ribbon.

I had two different spools of silver cord. Each was too narrow on its own but combined they were wide enough to make one of the metal tubes that make up the track.

Next, I had to make train cars. I spent more time visiting the Lionel train website. After a fair amount of obsessing I made a caboose out of a piece of a pillow cover.

Clearly, this piece of upholstery had meaning for my client and I hadn't used very much of it. I satin stitched the windows using both black and metallic bronze thread so it would look like sun glinting off of the windows. I embroidered 2021, the year of the baby's birth where one would expect the car number to be. If you noticed that the rivets in the center of the train wheels are stitched in gold congratulate yourself on your excellent vision.

I had one more train car to make. I finally decided on a hopper car.

it is made out of one of grandma's t-shirts and is filled with scraps of Imari printed cotton. I am very fond of my fabric. My sister-in-law made a tablecloth out of this exact fabric in the early 1980s and I associate this fabric with her gracious home.

I was finally ready to piece all of the strips together.

This is the center of the quilt. The composition makes sense. All that is left to do is the border, the backing, assembling all three layers of the quilt, and making a binding. The hard work is behind me.

When my client and I were discussing this quilt I asked her if she wanted a relatively flat quilt batting or a fluffy one. She wanted a fluffy quilt.  These days the style in the world of quilts is flat batting. I purchased a batting online and it was thin.  I chose to quilt each strip to the batting and then order a fatter batting to beef up the fluff factor---so the quilt will have not one but two layers of batting.

One of the advantages of this double batt method is that I could play with the quilting design as I did here quilting waves onto the bottom of Noah's ark.

There are a few more small details that I will add before I start on the borders