Thursday, December 8, 2011

Picking up where I left off.

Finished the patched top for my Christmas quilt.  Just waiting for my border fabric to arrive in the mail.  I buy all of my fabrics online, since the lqs is about an hour away by train.   Decided to pick up my sister's baby quilt and continue patching together the whirleygigs.  I have all the squares done, the next step is to trim them to 6.5 x 6.5 inch squares.  Actually, I lied...the next step is to iron that last seam on all 40-odd squares, and I am not in an ironing mood...ugh.


To give you an update on the repairs made to my Singer 301a, all is going very smoothly since I replaced the tension spring.  Stitching is just eaiser now that I have taken the free motion quilting foot off and replaced it with my regular foot.  I love to fmq, but that big bed quilt for my mother in law almost did me in!  So much fabric to deal with, it was a real pain in the butt!  I dont want to quit on fmq'ing, but maybe just take a short vacation from it and do some straight-line quilting for my next couple of projects.

Not that I get into the whole Schadenfreude thing, but I did enjoy reading about someone elses fmq blues at Summerfield Quilts.  Angie is an experienced quilter, and to see that even the experts get frustrated sometimes was encouraging to me.  Angie solved her problems by replacing the cheap batting she was using with warm and natural.  That's what I always use, so her solution won't help me, but knowing that I'm not alone will.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Patrick. Unfortunately the batting wasn't cheap and I bought four yards of it. It does fine with straight line quilting but isn't fmq friendly. Warm and Natural is my batting of choice too and my hubby is better educated now. lol.

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  2. Do you think the basting spray played any part in your troubles? I would love to find an easier solution than pinning, but have heard mixed reviews about sprays. Also, do you generally straight line quilt a "grid" on your quilt before you begin fmq'ing or not?

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  3. PS, what have you done/will you do with your Christmas swap fabrics? I posted a few in progress images of my quilt on the flickr page.

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