Meet My Xbox

It was with some trepidation, that I started to quilt on the Square Deal Mystery .. Considering what happened with my Hopscotch quilt! I must have quilted the snot out of a scrap piece of batting and backing to make sure that my stitches were going to be okay ..

I did the first row across the top, then got the next pass done on the next row then stopped and started to shred the tissue. I know this isn’t the best pic .. nite time and a flash, but hopefully you can see well enough that my stitches are all nicely uniform AND evenly spaced – just how I like them. I’m a wee bit shaky for the first bit, then I got into my groove and it feels right and good! I’m using the thread that I grabbed for $1 a spool at fabricland for this and i really do like the way it looks on this one block ..

I’ve also managed to place this so that the ‘flower’ part of the motif is landing on the top of the blocks .. This is the 2 oz batt that I got on sale at Joann’s back a bit and I just love it! Has a nice heft to it, just enough definition so your quilting isn’t flat. AND my machine likes this weight! Oh and notice how you can’t see thru this one!

This is going to quilt up pretty quickly too ..I got a quite a bit done in about an hour or so .. and that included picking off the tissue on the first block! I am feeling confident again! Stitching is good front and back! It’s going smoothly and is going to look just GREAT when I get it done .. I am going to have to hand sew on the sleeve hanger tho .. I had planned this quilt edge to edge and well my trick of using the border quilting to secure it, isn’t going to work of course. Oh I just realized that I hadn’t posted my mock up of the quilting on this quilt .. Since the photo isn’t quite straight, you’ll not see the exact lining up of the motifs on the blocks – but you get the general idea.

Tomorrow I am hoping / planning / praying to have the quilting done .. it’s not an unreasonable goal! And get some decent daylight pics too!  I’ve been starting to refer to this quilt as the Xbox .. no bloody clue why .. maybe i’m thinking / dreaming of Qbert from back in the day and hoping it might come out as an arcade classic???  LOL

Butterflies N Hopscotch

I rather had a dilemma of sorts today. It was time to put the binding on, but my calculations, I was ¼” short .. **sigh .. of course … so that meant I needed to get creative .. which is rather fun and okay .. and this means .. my first pieced binding!!

I was talking to carmen and started to pull various bits n pieces of the fabrics I had left, as well as some other’s that were close to what i had in this quilt .. Then tossed them in some semblance of ‘order’ near the quilt to see how it looked .. Okay that works pretty good .. get rid of the two hot pinks, the blue that looks like the purple and that yellow .. to bright .. After picking thru the piles I ended up with these guys here .. and then added up what I had .. okay .. need to whittle it down a bit .. have enough here to do maybe 2 quilts this size LOL

I had put the quilt aside before cutting on my sewing chair .. well not even 5 mins goes by and Pix decides he’s going to claim this quilt yet again .. We’ve been having a few issues with that him and I … and he generally loses too .. but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

I start sewing my strips together – now I didn’t measure for the seam allowances .. the idea of THAT much math right then was enough to make my blood freeze – so i figured I would just go from there and add if needed .. well after all was said and done .. I was 6″ short .. I’m like ..can I NOT get a break today .. and I soooo did NOT want to cut another whole strip for 3 – patches of purple – so I didn’t 😀 went digging thru my stash instead, the one purple isn’t likely to get noticed, and the 2 patches there have a silvery ‘paint’ on them so they look brighter than they really are ..

But all in all with various challenges .. I am moving this quilt to the binding pile:D It’s actually ‘done’ .. there are some issues, but I can live with them and that’s all that counts since this quilt is for me .. not being given away or sold .. pour moi! How cool is that?!!?  First pieced binding, seams pressed open so it’s not to bulky to hand sew thru – I think it might actually work!

Tomorrow I get to cut tissue for the square deal mystery 😀

Shredding Butterflies

That just sounds so evil doesn’t it?? But, it really is a good thing .. 😀 If I’m shredding that means I’m done quilting!! You can see the one corner where I picked some of it off to check my quilting and discovered that my tension wasn’t quite right. I wasn’t the happiest person in the world when I saw that .. rather a heart sinking feeling, I’d been so excited about this quilt and finally getting ot quilting it. I do love how it looks tho and the thread is something else!

It was only about 1 hours work to get it finished – including printing out the last row of motifs that I needed. I was able to adjust and get the right tension – plus I gave my machine a cleaning and oiling as it was starting to clunk. Oh my you should have seen the the lint bunny that was breeding under there (!!) WOWSERS! Surprised that my machine wasn’t coughing up lint balls! Poor thing!

Here’s a close up of the corner where I started with the tension not right. I ‘fixed’ this by speeding my foot and slowing down my hands. I’ve done a few batting thicknesses on this machine and haven’t had this problem before. I think I finally found it’s limit. I guess there had to be one .. no machine can be totally impervious to everything. And this machine is pretty tolerant!

I was tickled when I fixed it and the results. Granted the stitching is ‘closer / thicker’ than I normally like to do in spots until I got more even with it, but it’s close enough. And this quilt is for me, so it’s not like it’s a gift, nor one I’m going to sell where I’d have frogged the quilting .. and you KNOW how I hate to do THAT! I just LOVE this thread .. it’s gorgeous .. I nice weight and feel too! I swear it’s like it was made for this quilt and vice versa.

So I’m steadily shredding away. it is rather tedious, but once you get into a groove, it’s mindless – just need to hope that there’s a decent movie or some such on to keep your mind busy. I’m maybe ¹/3 of the way done, and am hoping to have it done later on tonite. Now I just have to think about binding .. there’s so many different colours in this quilt that I think that I can get away with anything .. not sure I want to do a light colour tho, and a lot of these colours I have no more of .. this was my first mystery and first scrappy quilt .. granted it’s ‘controlled’ scrappy, but still scrappy 🙂

Hopefully by tomorrow, I can get some daylight pics of it before it heads for the binding pile . now wouldn’t that be GREAT. Hmmm ..

February

1. Pieced big fan top
2. quilted  Michigan Left
3. got the 1800 together …

Now for March –

1. quilted Franken’quilt’
2. Colour Challenges
3. quilted Kitty Quilt
4. Square Deal Top done and basted
5. quilting hopscotch ..

Sweet!

How are ya’ll doing with your WIP / WISP piles???

Butterflies playing Hopscotch

So close and yet so far .. I really wanted to get this done today, but it’s just not going to happen .. see how close I am to finishing .. **sigh.

I do just love the thread I got for this! It’s gorgeous! A wee bit thicker than what I’m using in my bobbin, but that’s usually fixable by adjusting your upper tension. Operative word in that sentence is … “usually”!! The batting is causing me some minor fits. Remember how thin I said it was? Yup, it’s THIN! Could almost be like no batting at all. The lack of thickness, with no pressure from the top and bottom (doing free motion with doggies covered) on the fabric isn’t really giving the stitches a chance to ‘grab’ like they normally would. I’m thinking if that’s an exaggeration, but i don’t think so .. I do know that the thinness is causing the tension issues .. as I just did the kitty quilt (cotton batting) and the franken’quilt’ (poly) with no problems.

The ‘lack of a batting’ just made things interesting enough to make my tension adventurous! Easily solved by speeding up the machine and slowing down my hands .. so that’s all good there .. only thing is that when Reg went to sleep, I couldn’t do my slower rate so the machine was quieter .. **sigh There is no justice sometimes! So I opted to stop for the nite.

Tomorrow before I start, I’ll be needing to print a 4½” row – some minor adjustments in the graphic and I’ll be good to go .. I rather thought it would be short, but wanted to see just how much short ..

I did get a pic of some of the quilting today .. rather hard to see as it’s a nite shot. I do like the way the butterflies are flitting along the quilt top! And you can pick up a bit of how great this thread looks .. almost like they were made for each other 😀 OH and for the big fan quilt?? I’m going to double this batting and see if THAT doesn’t solve things!

Plodding Along ..

Good thing I’m not in a race for any land speed records .. I’m just frittering away at the motifs ..

Took me over a day to decide what quilt to do first! I actually had my motifs all picked out for both of them, as well as being all set to print to the tissue paper. It was just a matter of cutting the paper and printing. Well you know there’s math involved of course – I want to get the most motif sheets out of each sheet of paper and 20 x 20″ is an awkward size to work with it. Plus I wanted to be sure that I had enough for both.

I finally opted to do Hopscotch first – mostly because this one used the most sheets and my motif sheets were bigger and involved some ‘interesting’ cutting. Seems to rather be the case with me, doesn’t it??? For this one, I couldn’t settle on a border motif – and rather wanted that squared away before I started to cut paper. Granted the border is 3″ wide, but I was also entertaining the thought of doing edge-to-edge with this one .. never done that before and the idea rather intrigued me. I’ve been thinking all along of this quilt as a summer type one .. colours, name, motifs – and the fact it rather defaulted to a really thin batting :\, and no summer scenes intrigued me enough for the borders – unless I put butterflies in the borders and a beach, summer or garden scene in the main body .. but naw .. just did butterfly borders for the kitties .. and i love the way this one flits along my quilt top.

So after doing my math and figuring out how many sheets I would need – I got busy printing .. refined my printing method too and it seemed to go faster with less up and down for me .. and out of 56 sheets printed – only one paper jam .. and that was my first one ever doing printing on tissue paper .. coolies 😀 Tomorrow is a good day to start quilting me thinks. FINALLY! LOL

I’ve added a new tutorial for printing on tissue paper – figure this will save me retyping it out 🙂  Hope it helps you!

From Basting to Quilting Pile

That’s always a good feeling – moving quilts from the waiting to baste to the waiting to quilt pile. Granted I ‘cheated’ and used spray baste, but they are basted!

I’ve spent ½ the nite and part of today searching for motifs for the square deal mystery quilt. It was rather tricky as this is a contemporary design, but not a new one – toss in geometric to the fun and you have some interesting ‘issues’ popping up .. I must have tried at least 8 different designs before I finally settled on one – now the only issue is whether to quilt the borders in the allover pattern, or SID them so they stand out. Decisions, decisions!! Now the thread was the easy part .. I’m going to use the thread I grabbed at fabricland for $1 a spool .. Gotta love THOSE sort of specials 🙂 This thread is variegated and has the most of the colours as the quilt does .. but it does have a pretty close match up to the background material The quilting motif will be similar to an orange peel motif but with more flair and another element added in between the ‘main’ motif

As I figured, my dad came over and wanted the quilt .. he was ready to take it down off the clips and take it with him! I said – I’m likely selling that one .. he goes – how much .. I tell him and he goes WHAT??? and offers me $10 – I just look at him, so he goes up to $25 .. I just turn my back and walk into my sewing room and start to grab bits and pieces of the material I used in the quilt .. hehehehehe .. I hand the fabric bits to him and say, here you go .. $25 worth of that quilt LMAO!!! The look on his face was priceless!!! That rather ended that – for now .. we’ll see what he has to say about it when it’s quilted. Then he goes .. make them bigger .. I’m like dad, people are choking over paying $60 for a pieced and quilted baby quilt .. they are NOT going to be $300 plus for a bed quilt .. he goes .. I would .. I just look at him then look at the mystery X – yeah right!

The other one I got ready for quilting is my hopscotch quilt. This was the first mystery I did last summer. Ann Smith from Quilt Talk and Mystery Quilters (I think) wrote this one. From my thread order that came in yesterday I specifically got thread for this quilt. They all it Mediterranean and it is summery in look .. and this quilt reminds me of summer. The motif for this one was super easy .. butterflies with bees in the border .. I think .. not sure on the bee part, we’ll have to see ..

Hopscotch

I used the batting I picked up at fabricland and it’s pretty thin .. good thing this will be a summer quilt .. I’ll see if I can double this for the big fan quilt (that would have been basted too, but ran out of backing **sigh) I had already opened this one up to ‘relax’ it and was worried about shifting – I’m not sure I can double it up like that .. Then again – telling me not that I can’t do that is the quickest way to get me to do it – or at least try it.

So, I’m off to print my motifs 😀 now which one to do first .. the mystery X will be the quickest me thinks. Specially since it’s just over a yard square 😀