Jacob's Ladder - first finishing point

Tomorrow is the deadline for the Quilting is Murder UFO challenge, and I have worked on nothing else since learning of it early last month.  Well, nothing else in my sewing room - of course there was plenty to distract me, like the kind of work I get paid for doing 40+ hours/week, working out, cleaning the house, and so on.  But my spare time all went into this quilt.

Remember, I started with a box full of blocks and a quilting stencil that I had put away in 2001:

And then I decided on a double sawtooth border using some thangles:

Finally I got the top put together and basted last weekend, and tried a new marking technique with a pouncing spray:

Now the deadline arrives and my goal was to have the bulk of the quilting done on the center of the top.  I have quilted all the center blocks with the sheaf of wheat template, and the ladder sections to look like ladders.  There are some open squares still that I'm thinking about another stencil in, and I have the edge sections and borders still to do (no idea what to do in the 4.5" wide white border!) but it is finished to the point that it is being submitted to the judges for the challenge today on the Flickr group. 

First, the "completed" top:

And I have to choose one of these detail photos to submit:

It feels really strange to submit a quilt for "judging" with pins still in the borders and markings still all over the fabric.  This is not a quilt I'd ever be submitting for real judging.  The seam quality on the swap blocks made it very challenging to put them together well, and my machine quilting definitely shows signs of improvement from rocky beginning to smoother finish.  I'm not going to ask for any votes, and am not even posting this to my Facebook page, because I really only want people interested in the contest itself to participate in the voting.  I like the way they've organized it with the shop owners getting 100 votes each to balance out the ballot-box-stuffing that happens.  I trust that the judges know what they're doing with the rules they created for this challenge!

Still, I didn't participate in this to win (yet) another sewing machine.  I wanted to get this UFO finished, and I wanted some practice at building my machine-quilting skills, and I wanted to try out some new-to-me techniques, and I've accomplished all that (or am on my way to doing so).  I plan to continue with this past tomorrow's deadline to get it DONE done before I turn to working on any of my other projects. So regardless of how the contest turns out, I consider myself a winner.  ;-)