This Week...

This week my Aunt Janie came to visit.  She insisted that she wanted to see my quilts, so I happily obliged.  Little did she know there would be so many.  Little did I know - and I didn't even end up showing her all of them!  I think they have been multiplying.  :)

Today I rented time on a long arm machine and quilted Julie's Skill Builder Sampler quilt.   Don't you love the colors she used?   It was fun to quilt it up for her!

Tomorrow I need to focus on the garden.  It is time to do some planting, weeding and mowing!  My reward for working hard in the garden?  A full day of sewing on Saturday with the DMS Modern Quilt Guild!!!  It doesn't get much better than that.  :)

Good News, Bad News, Best News

Good News!  Yesterday I rented time on a long arm quilting machine and worked on my Skill Builder Sampler Quilt!  I had a lot of fun trying new things in each of the blocks.  None of them are perfect, but it is a Skill Builder, right?

 There were swirls.

 Squares.  I had a lot of fun doing this one but my husband thinks it is ugly, whatever...It is awesome!

 Pebbles and flowers.

 Stars.  Not my best design choice to fill in the negative space, but live and learn.  Husband thinks they look like witches' stars...They are just regular stars!  Men...

 Big swirl.

I borrowed a stencil to do something special in the middle of the feathered star.

 I even tried my hand at feathers.  Can you see them in the white?

 But my favorite block is this one.  I loved the block to begin with and I love the flowers and leaves around the edges.  I may be bad at feathers, but I can free motion quilt me flowers like no one else!  :)

Bad News...my backing wasn't long enough!  @#$%#  It stopped about six inches before the end of the quilt!   So I am cleaning the house, posting this and basically procrastinating so I won't have to deal with adding on an extra strip of backing, basting and quilting the bottom.  Ick.  I hate messing up!  I'm trying to tell myself that it won't be so bad, just take a deep breath and do it, right?  :)

Best News.  I have the best baby in the whole world.  No, don't bother to argue, it is true.  :)  I took her to the quilt shop with me and she played happily on the floor the whole time.  Some fussing when she had a messy diaper or was hungry or ready for a nap, but she was Amazing!  I brought an exersaucer for her to play in and a backpack carrier for her to ride in, but didn't have to use them at all.  She just played on the floor with her toys - thankfully she can't crawl yet!  I figured taking care of her added an extra hour onto the quilting process, but it was well worth the extra rental time to finally have the quilt done...well, almost done...
Wish me luck!

Updated:  I did it!  And it wasn't even that bad.  ;)  Off to bind!

Long Arm Quilting

 

My friend Julie made this beautiful quilt (Hexagon Park) and trusted me enough to quilt it for her.  This time the long arm quilting on the rented machine went much smoother than before - thanks for all of your tips!

 I made big mums in the center of all the large hexagons...

...and little mums in the border blocks.  I made little loopy things along the border.  The loopies were the hardest part, I kept getting mixed up about which way they were suppose to go.  

And the best part?  Julie watched my kids while I quilted.  When I went to pick them up they all showed me how they had climbed the tree while I was gone.  I have heard numerous complaints since about how we don't have a climbing tree in our yard -- yeah, it's a tough life.  :)

First Long Arm Quilt

Last week I took a long arm class at The Heart of Quilting in Des Moines.  It was a four hour class and I learned how to thread, load, free motion quilt, use a panogram, start and stop, unload and clean the machine.  It was soooo fun.  I was awful at the panogram (where you trace a pattern with a laser light and it sews it on the quilt) but pretty good at the free motion quilting.  The lady who was teaching me said that the more you have practiced FMQ on your home machine the easier it comes on a long arm. 

Yesterday I took my friend Rachel's quilt into the shop to quilt.  It took 1 hour and 20 minutes to set up!  Augh.  There weren't any real problems, it just took awhile.  And then I got to quilting.

Rachel had taken a look at my practice "quilt" from the class and said she wanted loopies all over the dark area but not on the white areas.  The great thing about quilting in a like color thread is that it is hard to see any mistakes, but it is also hard to see your thread so I ended up having some areas where I ran back into my own quilting and one small area that got forgotten.

Here is the whole quilt.  Isn't it pretty?  She used the 10 minute block from this You Tube video.  

Have you ever been so proud of something, yet so uggh! about the mistakes?  It is a weird feeling.  I am totally proud of quilting this King sized beauty, but disappointed in the number of mistakes I made.  Crazy perfectionist.  :)  I have a whole list of large quilts that I want to long arm quilt next year.  I can't wait!