on a roll

OK, we're on a roll this week. Yesterday - finished Garrett's quilt!! hand tacked the binding...for the first time in my quilt making history, the binding seemed very straightfoward. Nice to get to that point. Next quilt, I'll machine tack the binding, to give it a nice finished edge. Pix of garrett's quilt ..somewhere in here.
NOW!! zooming through Emma's quilt...decided to keep to the cobblestone theme, and do grid quilting rather than free motion. Had to work out how to handle the yellow blue and red (pix next post), without changing thread every 2 minutes, and also to not have the quilting thread over power the yellow and blue. SO solution...invisible thread on top, red on the bottom. Having some issues working out the tension so that the red thread does not pull through to the top, but I think I may have worked that out on the wall hanging portion of the project...so have just put my quilt sandwich together, machine is all suited up, have my face mask on (multi tasking of course!!), Toby and I are going to head out to get some chips...and then we are in for long haul tonight. GOAL!!! finish the quilting on Emma J's quilt tonight! and then just need to bind it...in time for Emma's potential visit this weekend! Rose, Garrett's quilt should be in the mail on Monday!!!

border time

Just starting the border now...new favourite resource site is http://www.quiltuniversity.com/. I'm loving having the office right by my sewing room - as I run into questions, I dash into the office, search quilt university or other quilting sites, or find a video on youtube to help me out. Who knew quilting and technology would go so well together? My sewing machine is low tech - it can do straight stitches, zig zag and buttonhole (although I have some pretty fancy feet for quilting!), and my training tools are as high tech as they get. Love it.

Garrett's quilt - quilting is done! (but not the quilt yet)

Last night, I took many deep breaths...and finished the quilting. I had to accept that it won't be the most professional job, that I'm still learning...and lo and behold, it turned out pretty good. Except for the back. Somehow I'm not getting the tension right. Not sure how to fix that up. So now have to sink the threads, and do the binding and done!!! The binding is less scary than it used to be, now that I've done a few. In fact, I may even try to nicely machine stitch this binding rather than hand stitch it, just to give it a whirl. My mitred corners on the last quilt turned out much better than I expected, so there should be just that much more improvement this time! and yes, picture pictures pictures. Coming. I want to take a course with quilt university online that teaches how to take good pictures of my quilts. And on a tangent, taking pictures with the camera and then having to load them to the computer and then post them strangely seems like a very convoluted process. What does that say about how much we rely on technology??