....and finished it!

Wow, this was fun!!

I took a few days off between the buildings and the rest, but when I sat down to do the rest -- none of which involved those time-consuming pivots! -- I just kept on going until the whole thing was quilted. Wow! I think I might need more small projects in my future; it is so very rewarding to actually do the quilting I envision instead of what I settle on because I can't manage a bed quilt through my little machine, and to finish without stiff shoulders and a sore neck!

With the buildings and street done, I moved right to the hills/rain forest portion. I debated thread color for a while, and decided I wanted to emphasize the "city cutting through the rain forest" aspect so stuck with the gray thread. I quilted simple contour lines, following the curves of the hills with a simple straight stitch.

hills are quilted

Then I moved on to the little bit of sand in the lower left corner; I did a simple diagonal cross hatch over that little piece, just to give it a different texture from the rest. For the ocean, I played with decorative stitches on a piece of spare fabric until I found the look I wanted. I have a super basic machine, so not many stitches to play with, and I don't know what this one is called (it's "J" on my machine...) but I liked that it looked like waves, without me having to do free motion quilting of waves.

and now the waves are done

I used a dark blue 30 wt. thread for this part and then with my walking foot just followed the shore, overlapping the top row a bit as well as overlapping the sand to mimic how water laps the shore in real life. The decorative stitch did all the work for me, and I am thrilled with how it turned out. yay!

For the sky I switched thread again, to a varigated blue to white King Tut thread. Back to a straight stitch, and still with the walking foot, but I quilted in gentle curvy lines to give a more organic, windy, breezy kind of feel....air currents rarely go in straight lines, after all. I skipped over some buildings, curved around the tops of others and just had fun with the free flowing aspect of it; sometimes I crossed lines I'd already quilted, sometimes I drew really near, sometimes I moved far far away, just quilted as it felt right.

wavy air currents across the sky

None of the quilting lines, for any of this, were marked at all, except that on the buildings I did mark one single line to indicate did I want the lines going horizontal, vertical, diagonal, etc. For the rest of this I just followed the outside edge of the part being quilted, and then followed the sewn lines; for the sky I just improv'ed the whole thing.

finished! well, waiting on binding....
also -- should the SP "pop" just a little more....hmmmm.

Now it waits for binding....not sure yet what fabric I want to use for that, so I'm working on my next bed quilt while I mull over my options for finishing this project.