Feel the Fear...And Do It Anyway*

This quilt has been on my HQ16 for the last couple of weeks and I haven't done a single stitch of quilting on it yet. It's made by a friend who has had me quilt a good number of her quilts in the past. She's the one who always lets me just play on her tops without restriction and I'm usually happy to do it, even if I am a bit afraid to try a new design.

This one has had me paralyzed for a while. The solid red sections have a chenille design, and at first, that was what worried me. But I soon realized that I could easily quilt around the chenille. The problem I have is deciding what color thread to use. I have a very nice red that would work quite well on both the red section and the pieced section, but the red thread will look awful on the cream colored backing (you can't see that in this photo). The backing really needs a cream-colored thread, but I'm afraid of having little dots of cream thread show through on the red fabric and little dots of red show through on the backing. And cream thread will look awful on the red if I used it on the top. In order to use red thread on top and cream thread on the bottom, the thread tension will have to be perfect. Hence my fear!

But this is silly -- I need to get over the fear, so I've decided to write the quotation from this post's heading on the white board above my machine and plan to tackle the quilting this weekend. If it works, you'll see a photo of the result on my blog sometime next week...
*The quotation is the title of a 1987 book by Susan Jeffers.