Quilt of Valor Take Two

After my first go at quilting a Quilt of Valor quilt, I was a tad bit hesitant to go straight to the second one I had waiting for me in the closet.  So I took a break and thoroughly enjoyed quilting the brown heart quilt from eBay.  After recharging my batteries on the eBay quilt I was ready to tackle my second Quilt of Valor (QOV) quilt.  I carefully checked the backing for any flaws in the fabric and did find a small stain on the edge this time before I was halfway through quilting.  So I carefully loaded the quilt so the stain would not be on the finished portion of the quilt.

Locked, loaded and ready for quilting.

I then chose a pattern for this beauty.  I have a very fun loopy flower but the flowers on the fabric of this quilt were more pointy.  So I went into the pattern library of my Pantovision software and started looking around.  That's a place I had visited since I got my machine and decided those patterns were way to hard for me.  This time they didn't look nearly as daunting and I found a cute and simple pointy flower that I thought accented the flowers in the quilt print nicely.  I had never used this pattern before and normally I would try it out before I went to work. But I had already loaded the quilt and decided what the heck I was just going to go for it.  I started slowly and the pattern proved not to be too difficult.  Six weeks ago I would never have thought of just going for it without hours of practicing.  What a difference some quality time at the machine makes in workmanship and quality.

A picture of the quilting on the top side of the quilt.

Finishing this quilt didn't take too long. I finished it up Friday night because my good bicycling friend, Susan, was coming over to see my new set up.  So I wanted to get it off the frame and load some practice fabric so she could try out this new monster taking up a bedroom in our house.  I also was heading to Wichita the next morning for a meeting so it worked out nicely so I could deliver both of the QOV back to the coordinator who lives there.

A picture of the backside of the quilt when I was finished quilting.  

The lessons learned while working on this quilt were more of  confidence building type instead of the workmanship side of things. Since these flowers were more pointy I had to concentrate to make sure I stopped at each point before returning back down so I had a true point on the petals of the flowers.
I delivered both QOV Saturday morning and traded them in for a new QOV that I will quilt up here in the next few weeks.