Regaining momentum

Just before we left on vacation, I was making good progress quilting the blue Kyoto Gardens.  We had a lovely vacation in Ottawa (Canada’s capital) enjoying the sights, letting the kids soak in Canadian history, and reconnecting with some family and friends.  I had a wonderful trip but by the time I came back I had lost all my quilting momentum.

Most of last week was spent feeling I should be finishing up Kyoto Gardens but not actually doing so.  I didn’t work on anything else either, since I should have been working on Kyoto Gardens.  On Friday I realized I had a gift to make so started in on a table runner, and that was OK, because it has a deadline so I could neglect the other.  I regained a bit of momentum and finished the top last night.

It’s a repeat of one I designed a couple of years ago in orange/red/yellow to use up extra flying geese units. This weekend’s version is in colours that will go with the recipients’ home décor, but I think this design would work in pretty much any colour scheme.  I may need to try this I Christmas fabrics… but first I need to get the brown and blue one quilted and sent off to its new home.

Reaching an agreement

This week I finally stopped moaning and groaning about the unquilted quilt tops.  Can you believe they just were not responding, not basting and quilting themselves?  I gave in, basted my blue Kyoto Gardens and started quilting.

Let’s not count up how many hours I’ve spent so far.  I have quilted in the ditch along the long border seams (but not the designs I’ll be adding in the borders) and some straight lines in the ditch in the sashing.  I still have to stitch in the ditch along the inside white parts of the sashing.  This was all done with my trusty walking foot.

At about 10:30 pm  I decided I needed a bit of encouragement to keep going.  Stitch in the ditch is pretty well hidden and I wanted to see some designs so I switched to the free-motion foot to work on a block. 

This is when my freemotion presser foot and I reached an agreement.  It is happy to assist me with curved lines.  It will stretch to accommodate stitching in the ditch in matching thread, where wobbles are camouflaged.  It will, however, refer me to its friend (and mine) the walking foot when I insist on wanting straight even quilting lines that line up at a very particular spot.  This of course means that I agree to wrestle the quilt into position to get it oriented just so for the walking foot.  Wavy wobbly lines with uneven stitches would just show up too much in these white spaces with this design so I’ll do it.

I suppose I could just have decided to quilt this differently, without the need for well-behaved, even lines but I’m not sure that would have helped much anyway.  I don’t have a large surface level with the machine, I don’t have the budget to buy a cabinet, and I don’t have storage to store a large makeshift extension between uses.  That means that a large quilt gets easily snagged on the corners of my short extension table, which causes jags and uneven stitches as the quilt gets caught or uncaught.  I think I grind my teeth less maneuvering the quilt under the walking foot than dealing with the random but frequent aggravations of the snags.  Until and unless I get set up better, I’ll save the freemotion for smaller projects or borders.

So for now, Freemotion, Walking and I are all agreed on who does what and the quilt will finally get done.

It’s been how long?

I’ve been meaning to sit down and sew for a while now but somehow didn’t until tonight.  When I flicked the switch on the machine and it didn’t turn on, I noticed that it was unplugged.  Gasp!  Is that legal?  That is when I realized I have not sewn since I brought the machine back downstairs after quilting Love’s quilt upstairs on the kitchen table.  That was a month ago.  No wonder I was starting to feel a little out of sorts!

Here’s tonight’s dose of medicine.  I visited a new-to-me quilt shop with my friend Nettie last week and came home with these fabrics. I wondered how my Jelly Bean Stars quilt would look in a completely different style of fabric.  I figured 1800’s reproduction prints would be just about as opposite as I could get to the bright colours I used originally.

I think I like it.  I had planned to make just one test block so I could include a picture in the pattern I’m writing up to show how it could work in other fabrics.  Now I’m contemplating heading out to the local quilt shop to increase my reproduction fabrics collection.  I can see this made up as a whole quilt, looking warm and cozy next winter on my couch.  I could pull some gold tones from these fabrics for the sashing stars…  Oh yes, I’m afraid I’ll have to go for a stroll downtown, and the stroll just might take me past the quilt shop!