Wednesday, September 7, 2011

WIP on Wed - Sept 7

Since my last post, I continued to practice my FMQ.  I bought these gardening gloves for $5 which has helped my loops to be more consistently round.  I did try the new "quilting thread" which involved a very complicated set up with straws, wire clothes pins and rubber bands to get the thread to feed right.  Apparently my machine was embarassed and deleted that photo when I wasn't looking b/c it's not on my photo card. 

I've always admired swirls like this.  I never imagined it to be so hard to keep the spacing even.


I saw a quilt years ago where the long-stitch length was variable and reminded me of Morse Code.  I tried some dot-dot-dash.  Next time I'll alternate the pattern more so dashes don't line up (since I wasn't as good at that as I imagined I would be.)
The yellow stitching I did early in this project and was working on filling in with double loops I refer to as "Olives".   And then I ran out of bobbin.  When I returned to stitching, the thread insisted on making giant rat nests on the back.  I re-threaded multiple times, tried different bobbin, tried different thread, dismantled the makeshift thread experiment.  No luck.  When I changed to the walking foot though, the thread seemed to work fine.  So I finished this section with wiggly lines.  And swore off quilting for the rest of the week.


So, I started piecing.  The extra squares we mistakenly cut out for the disappearing 9-patch became this 60x60 quilt top for a Mama's Quilt to go with the baby quilt.

I don't seem to make much progress on shortening my WIP list as I keep adding as much as I finish.  *sigh*

7 comments:

1 Lucky Duck Dreams said...

Love your machine quilting! Im working on mine too! BTW if we finished all of our WIP I think the world would end or our creativity would die. WIP are the spice of life!

2 Lynne said...

Ah, adventures in FMQ! I need to make some time for those!

3 Esther Aliu said...

Love your machine quilting! I know exactly what you mean. I think the morse code idea is a great one, you should really stick at it. The swirls looked fabulous too.

As for WIP lists, they are never ending lists...

4 Unknown said...

The gardening gloves are brilliant aren't they! The quilting's looking great, keep going

5 Stray Stitches (Linda G) said...

Your FMQ is wonderful! The garden gloves are a great idea.
The quilt top is beautiful!

6 Lynette said...

oh, doesn't it just churn your guts inside all up into a knot when the bobbin thread misbehaves that badly?

Btw - thanks for your backbasting tutorials. I tried that out on my Baby Janes for the first time, and I love it !! It really did take a lot of fear out of applique for me.

7 Kimberlee, The Spunky Diva said...

Your swirls and circles look very nice. Love what your 'extra' blocks turned into. v
~Kimberlee