Progress on the Gloria Patri

When I left off on this the last time, I'd finished printing my spiral-shaped Gloria Patri and was thinking about the quilting.  The first thing I did was to quilt around all the letters using white thread.  You can't see the quilting from the front but it stabilized the quilt and made the lettters puff a bit.  Here's the back where you can see all the quilting around the letters.

Then I browsed through one of my favorite sources for quilting ideas, especially for this kind of quilt, A Treasury of Hours by Fanny Fay-Sallois.  It's full of selections from many different historical books of hours.  

This time, the border designs on a picture of Matthew the Evangelist from the Rivoire Book of Hours caught my fancy.  Inspired by that leafy but bold pattern, I started quilting.  

The quilting spirals out with the text, in the middle the stems are blue and the flowers are red, as they spiral out the colors shift through several different shades of turquoise/blue green and pink/lavender to finally land on green stems with purple flowers.  There are multiple shades of thread in each section and the quilting took forever because there were so many stops and starts.  But it was very meditative, and not unenjoyable.  Unfortunately the texture in the bengaline fabric is almost like very small corduroy wales, and this makes the quilting look weirdly pixely or jerky in some places which made me very unhappy.  Also, because the background is white and the quilting is contrasting,  all the little mistakes show, but I guess that's part of the process!

For some reason the tension was really bad in some places going around the letters, so some of that will have to be ripped out and replaced, and then I need to finish the background quilting outside the spiral.  But I've made lots of progress so yay!

Linking up with the great Nina-Marie today.