It's Gettin' To Be A Pretty Long Journey

It seems as if I've been working on this quilt for years!  Well, at least months--and months (which I have).  And now I'm getting down to the final stretch.  My last hurdle has been how to transfer my feather drawing to the black border.  The usual way I would do this would be to use a light box and trace it with a pencil (light or dark depending on the fabric).  However, that wouldn't work in this case as the drawing wouldn't show up through the black fabric.  The other issue was that I couldn't mark the border ahead of time because the markings would have been rubbed off by the time I got to them.

 So, what to do?  I had used this Saral transfer paper in a class I took and thought it might work well in this case.

 This is the pattern I drew (which no longer has the little circles).

 More of a close up.  In order to transfer the pattern to the cloth, I could do only one fourth of the border, quilt it and then move on to the next section, repeating the process.  The process was this:  I carefully folded the batting and backing back under the body of the quilt and smoothed out the black border fabric. (I'm very fortunate to have a large table where I could do this fairly easily.)  I then started with the transfer paper under the pattern--but on top of the black fabric.  Using a ball point pen, I traced.

This is what that looked like.  I only traced the bare essentials.

 And this is the design quilted.  It was a somewhat messy process and the pattern was hard to hold in place--but it worked and was the only solution I could come up with at the time.

And this is the border after I've added the stippling stitching in the background.

So . . .I'm getting close.  The journey's been fun but I'm sort of ready to get into the station.