Snowy Evening: A Five Year Finish

5 years or so ago, Marianne, John's sister asked me if I wanted to work on a quilt project with her and Rachel. It was a Crabapple Hill design titled "Walking in a Winter Wonder Land"  with redwork embroidery snowmen with a pieced border. This is the picture on the pattern package:

I was intrigued, I have always like redwork and hadn't done any but I didn't like the title block with the musical staff and especially the block with a little verse on it.  It as just a little cutesy and meaningless to me. I said yes anyway and asked Annie if she wanted to do it with me. I had all of mom's red fabric that she had collected in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that she has stashed and thought it was be a fun way to use some of it. 

Annie and I loved quilting together. It was so fun to get together on Mondays, her day off and stitch for a few hours. We soon decided that we each wanted our own quilt and would do the embroidery on our own and piece the border together.  I was a little humbled to see that Annie's redwork was finer than mine. She was much more meticulous and sewed finer stitches than I did. And my redwork was pretty good. We would work on the quilt in the winter months then summer time, yard work and trips would happen and we would have to put our stitching away for a while. 

I finally got to the point that I had to make a decision about the verse and title blocks. Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" has always been a favorite of mine, even though I later learned he wrote it when he was contemplating suicide. "And miles to go before I sleep"  is a very profound thought no matter where you are in life. 

So I used Frost's title:

And the first verse of the poem:

As a side note, I machine quilted it using mono filament threat on the top. It is a clear nylon thread like very very fine fishing line.  So fine it is hard to see. I didn't want the quilting thread to show over the redwork and knew if I hand quilted it it would be another 5 years before it got finished. Using a non cotton thread goes against everything I know about quilting, especially one that is so non organic. But it did what I needed it to do and I am happy with the results. 

Now to finish the rest of my unfinished projects. Like this one: