What have you been doing the last 2 months?? Part 1

Mid February I headed to North Carolina to visit my younger daughter.  From there I headed to Virginia to visit my mother and attend the Mancuso Mid-Atlantic show in Hampton, VA.  I have gotten very spoiled being juried into the show every year for the last 5 years.  This is my 2012 entry and soon to be pattern.  These colors just sing to me.

SimplySweet
Juried entry, Mancuso Mid-Atlantic show.

Simply Sweet detail

This quilt is hand appliqued, hand quilted, and hand beaded.  Quilt designs come easy to me but the actual quilting designs are harder...all that blank space is like looking at a blank piece of paper when you are expected to write something.  Thankfully over time the meditation of applique brought me some fun designs to play with and I was very happy with what I came up with.

SimplySweet detail of center.

In the second detail photo, you can see the actual quilting stitches that I did in different colors of variegated threads from Weeks Dye Works.  I used their floss for years when I cross stitched and was delighted to find they have quilting thread now too in lovely colors.

You can also see more of the beading.  Stopping was so hard and thankfully the deadline was there to tell me to stop beading.  At one point I wanted to bead the entire border...the gold beads looked so wonderful on the purple border!
In the first photo you can see the border beads just in the corners.

How do you know when to stop a project?