Saturday, May 9, 2009

Quite a week!

   It has been quite a week! I've quilted 3 quilts on my frame now, with a fourth quilt loaded for tomorrow. Only the first one is bound. The picture below is my first batch of scrappy binding. It may not look impressive, but it took a long time for me to do. I still want to get my polka dotted binding sewn up as scrappy binding, as well as some wider binding I have. In this batch, I started with multiple colors, the longest piece was maybe two yards, the smallest less than a foot. After several hours of joining, I have 30 yards of scrappy binding. All of that too small to use binding, turned into usable binding for multiple quilts! It was worth all the time I spent on it. Tomorrow I might start on some of my other bindings, but Sunday I am taking off and not sewing at all.


    My quilting is getting better with each quilt. I am learning a lot. I have had to deal with starting new threads, thread breakage, adjusting tension, offsetting the pantograph, ripping out stitches while it's on the frame, lots of fun stuff. I learned valuable lessons with each glitch. I finished quilting the quilt today in just over an hour, and had no problems whatsoever. I chose directional backs for two of these quilts, and I really had to think about how to load those on the frame. One of those was the one I quilted today, and it looks good. I'm still using the simple curlicue pattern. My quilting is getting smoother looking, and I am slowly gaining confidence.
     The quilt that is loaded on the frame now, is my grandbaby's cat quilt. I was just sure I bought three yards of the backing fabric, but when I got it out, there was only two yards. I had just enough of the border fabric left, to add a strip of it down the center, and I had one cat body block left, which I put in the very center of the back. My guess is I could have gotten more of the backing fabric, but now that the back is pieced, it looks so cute I wouldn't change a thing. I'll post pictures when it is all finished, with the binding and everything. DD wants purple satin binding on it.
     


    Remember the flying geese quilt top I made a few days ago? These are the bonus HST's I got from it. I want to square them up, so they are not quite ready to use, but I have 96 HST's that are big enough to square to 4 1/2 inches. I am thinking that will amount to another charity top, once I add a couple of borders. I want to make my next flying geese a little smaller, but to get some ideas, I looked up flying geese quilts online the other night. I found this site
which gives links to several different ways of making flying geese. I found it all very interesting, and a couple of the ways I had not seen before. One of the no waste methods seemed very easy, and possibly worth trying for me. Well, it seemed like worth trying until I realized, if I use the no-waste method, I get no bonus HST's! : (  I love playing with the extra HST's from flying geese and snowball blocks. I use them in quilts on a regular basis. For me, there is no waste, there is just the start of another quilt. I decided not to try the other methods, LONG LIVE THE WASTE!
    Besides quilting, I had fun this week with a swarm of bees, dead fish, pool repairs, a tow truck, and two attempts at seeing the new Star Trek movie (theater lost power the first try). It's all good!

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