more longarming!

Last week I left you with the news that the hubby had a coworker retiring and I wanted to give her a quilt.  We had settled on a quilt, but it still needed to be quilted.

I decided I would take a break from the outside work on Friday and quilt it!

I knew about what I wanted to do in the "flowers" but the background had me stumped.  At first I thought about just straight lines (no rulers, but if they're not diagonal, I can do pretty well without it), but worried that would be too plain.  Once I loaded the quilt and continued to look at it, I decided it needed something to offset the swoopiness of the flowers and the quilting I intended to put there.  Also, being curved pieces, there was a little wonk in there (not a lot, but some), and all the quilting involved in those straight lines would forgive a lot.

I marked the corners with chalk and took a photo so I'd remember what I did.

And then I quilted the whole thing without taking any photos!  It took a while.

This is after it was done and I had to turn off my overhead lights because my camera tried to make the dark blue background look like some sort of algal bloom on an abandoned pond.  (Translated: gross.  Very gross.)

I trimmed it and then went searching for something for binding.  I bought enough of the blue background, but then, like a moron, miscalculated the number of pieces I needed, cut all of them, and now I do not have enough blue.

My initial idea of red was discarded, as none of the reds in the quilt have enough left.  Same with yellow.  And the two oranges I have enough of are both of the busier variety so might not look so great as binding.  Pink?  Yep.  I had enough pink.  Whew!  That was getting scary - thought I might have to make a trip to the store!

Woo hoo!  Quilted!

The machine behaved fairly well.  Averaged one thread break per flower, in its favorite spot.  Very few in the blue.  So not bad, but still frustrating.

I researched some more and tweaked a few more things before starting the next quilt.

I didn't think I was going to quilt this one yesterday, but the hubby suggested I just get it done.

I debated custom quilting, but there are SO MANY different blocks and I'd want to change thread colors (I do have green and red and white, so it wasn't a real problem that way), and I wasn't sure how the machine was going to behave, so I decided to just do an overall pattern.  One that, if the longarm broke threads, I'd have a good point to stop and start - swirls provide that, right?

So it got swirls.

One thread break per entire pass!  (Plus two bobbins running out.)  Very good, but I also did the baby quilt a few weeks back with minimal issues.

Just keep tweaking things, right?

I have no finished photos of this one, but I do have the red binding attached, waiting for hand-sewing.

This makes FIVE quilts waiting for hand-sewing the binding down.  I'm too busy getting everything else done to have the patience to sit still that long!

I have ONE more quilt I'd like to quilt.  And one more that is in progress (Positivity) that will need to be quilted before long.

By then I'll be on such a roll maybe I'll quilt some of the other languishing quilts?

NO!

I have so much cat hammock fabric, I need to work on those.  I have been - actually more than piecing even - but the pile never seems to get smaller.  The finished pile is climbing, but that's a whole other pile.

I found my favorite fat quarter from the masks leftovers donation...

...I set it on my cutting mat so you could clearly see the wastefulness of this decision.  (Please pardon my camera that also thinks this color is pond scum.  It's really just a solid grey.)

I can still use the edges for hanging loops, but there were a lot of fabrics with fairly ridiculous cuts made into them for a single mask.  This was by far the worst.

Oh well.  It was free to me and I'm figuring out how to use as much as I can.

And that is the whole story of my sewing week.  (There was weeding and watering outside, shifts at work, chores inside and all the normal just being alive stuff happening, too, but that's boring.)

Time to go see if I can squeeze in a little sewing before lunch with friends!

Happy quilting!

Katie