Turtles all the way around

A very good friend of my mother's (& of the whole family, actually), collects turtles.  Not living ones, but mostly realistic representations of turtles.

I have had a completed turtle quilt top for a while.  So long, I have been threatening to baste it & quilt it since before....well, it could have been done for last christmas, but it wasn't.

The pattern will certainly look familiar to anyone who is part of our quilt block swap, as it was the February 2010 block, although the color & concept were very different.  In this case, the fabric was from a bundle of batik fat quarters, I think A bought for me at a Tree City quilt show five or seven years ago.

But not the turtles themselves.  They were all packaged together & came from a grab bag gift exchange quite some time ago. I decided to use them on the corner pieces, the pieces that would never be cut & then laid the completed  blocks out using the reconciling the disparate sashing because the blocks were indeed quite disparate.  Not all the turtles squares were the same.  I do not think any of them were even square & I cut the whole block down to keep as much "turtle" as I could, ending up with nine blocks that were themselves n longer square.

& finally the quilting itself is what I call free-motion with walking foot.  I keep the walking foot on & the feed dogs up & just kind of slowly, gently swoop.  It is almost more a series of tai chi postures than anything else.

As for the turtles, aside from them being a long established favorite, I have nothing. Or too much.  My mother loves the book Old Turtle & has been know to gift it to the local public libraries of friends who have lost children.

The flat world exists on the back of a turtle according to the Iroquois.  This kicks off the favorite fable of physicists about turtles all the way down.  Which is also the much more prosaic expression for programming code that loops back on itself.

So here I am, back at the beginning again.  Only this time the quilt is quilted, the binding is on & everything is boxed to go tomorrow to mom, because she will turn the binding & stitch it down.  In this way I manage to never quite finish anything ever.