FMQ Woes and a Win

Normally when I'm getting ready to start quilting a quilt, I get ready the day before, choosing thread and winding bobbins. Since I was working on burp rags all weekend (halfway done those) I didn't do that this time. Well, I thought I had a cone of medium grey thread in 40 wt cotton. Surprise, I didn't. I've had issues with polyester thread on my Janome, but I figured surely I could conquer them, so yesterday I dug out a cone of poly in medium grey, and wound the bobbins. 

I quilted out the first motif, front looked great, checked the back and it looked pretty good. I tightened the tension just a smidge, stitched out a couple more motifs, checked the back, looked good. I them quilted for about 30 minutes before checking the back again. Uh-oh, eyelashes everywhere! Now, some of that was probably because I was going too fast, I have a tendency to just want to go as fast as I can. But, some of that was likely due to the Janome not doing well with poly thread. I can quilt that fast with cotton and not have all those issues. I'd still like to figure out how to get poly to behave with the Janome, but maybe with a quilt that doesn't have such an imminent deadline. I think I'm going to try a different type of needle next. If I quilt on my Bernina I can use any thread, it just sews like a champ with anything. 

I broke thread, dragged the quilt and a seam ripper upstairs, and proceeded to spend most of the day ripping out what I had quilted. The parts with the eyelashes were easy to rip out, but the parts that were quilted well took sooooo long. All I can say is thank God for same day Amazon delivery, because I ordered cotton thread before I started ripping, and had it in hand by dinner time. 

This morning it was time to try again. I wound bobbins of my cotton thread, and got to quilting. You better believe I was checking the back a LOT. All went well, I quilted for my usual hour, and now I'm blogging on my break. 

So, if that was my FMQ woe, what was my win? Well, for years now I've tried to find a design I can consistently stitch out large scale. Sometimes I don't want dense quilting on a quilt, and I've struggled to find something that works for me large scale without any marking. Oftentimes I resort to crosshatching with a walking foot if I want less dense quilting, but I don't always want straight quilting. Some of the designs I can easily stitch in medium or small scales, I just can't consistently stitch large scale. For example, if I'm stitching spirals, I can make tiny ones, and my usual has about a half inch between lines, but if I try for an inch between I just can't do it. Microstippling came easily to me, and I can meander with that same half inch scale, but I haven't been able to do larger scale, I always resort to getting smaller. When I'm quilting a king sized quilt, I felt like a larger design would work better, so all day Monday I was searching my FMQ resources for something new to try. 

I was doodling away while trying to find something I thought I had a shot at stitching larger scale. I find different quilting teachers better at teaching different things, and I knew my Patsy Thompson videos had some large scale designs. Fast and Free Volume 3 was just what I was looking for. I have a pretty tight deadline to get this quilt quilted, so I wanted something easy-ish, and larger scale so the quilt wasn't stiff, with the bonus of having less to quilt. 

I watched the chapters on the rotating axis family, which I've stitched out before, but not for quite a while. I think I'm going to use one of those for my next quilt. For this quilt I decided on something from the circling the element family. 

I guess the good thing about yesterday's fiasco is I got some practice in on the design I chose. 

This design kind of reminds me of peacocks. The win is that I've been able to stitch it large scale consistently! I keep up a mantra of "Slow down, stitch slowly" to keep myself from going too fast. It's far from perfect, but I've been FMQ long enough that I know as long as the quilting is consistent, when you step back and look at the quilt as a whole, it ends up looking fine. It doesn't have to be perfect. 

I finally got to give Mr. Z his cloak, and in exchange DD#1 brought me some duck eggs. 

It came out pretty good for starting as table runners and curtains! Now his younger brother wants one, but he's going to have to wait a bit. I'm actually going to have to buy fabric for his.