It's been a busy week this week. Dance lessons three nights takes up a lot of the available evening time. But I took Friday as a vacation day and went to two quilting workshops at the local quilt shop. Debbie Brown is a fun teacher. The first workshop was on feathers - how to design them into your quilting. We learned ideas for making feather borders, feathers in squares and triangles, in sashings, and in those really large setting squares you get with lone star-type quilts. Debbie had lots of sample quilts to pass around - all really pretty. The second workshop was a "how should I quilt this" lesson. We each brought quilt tops that we hung up and talked about what designs to use for quilting. Debbie used quilters preview paper to draw out ideas for spaces on the quilt. I took two tops - my Mexican Cross, and my SVQG inspiration round robin. I came home with plans for quilting both of those. Watching and talking about what to put on each quilt that was hung helped with how to look at a quilt to decide what to put on it. If I have a chance, I'll take more workshops from Debbie.
Yesterday, I put the Mexican Cross on the frame and got started quilting. I'm using So Fine thread, because I didn't want the heavy thread look of the King Tut. I put in a new needle, and checked the tension on both the bobbin and the top, and started quilting. It was going OK, but I was breaking thread more than I wanted to. I decided I needed to check the timing, since I had gone down in needle size. So I retimed, then I saw the next page of the manual, and thought I might need to replace my tension spring, so I did that. Got everything going again, and had awful tension problems - lots of birds nests underneath unless I hand the top tension cranked as high as it would go, then I'd still occasionally get an eyelash underneath. So I retimed again, and took out and redid the check spring a couple of times. I've finally got the machine stitching nicely with good tension again, so I'm making better progress now. It's taking a long time - first because I'm using 3 different threads - I'll stitch a few passes with one color, then roll back up and stitch that area with the second color, then go on to the third. I also spent a lot of time taking out bad stitching. I still have a few sets of feathers in setting triangles to tear back out, but I'll get to them after I finish with the rest of the quilting.
While I was at the LQS yesterday buying thread and batting, I picked up yardage for the backing to the round robin, so that's my fabric in this week. Out was a little more pink and brown for the borders for the Mexican Cross, plus the wide backing for Mexican Cross.
In this week: 4 yds
In YTD: 24.53 yds
Out this week: 3.76 yds
Out YTD: 30.95 yds
Net for 2011: 6.42 yds OUT
Check with Judy to see how everyone else is doing this week.
5 comments:
Hope your quilting tension problems are a thing of the past. Congrats on being in the black on the stash report.
I hope to see a picture of your completed Mexican Cross. I love feathers and if I could, I would quilt them on everything.
The quilting workshops sounded wonderful. Look forward to seeing your Mexican Cross quilt when it is finished. Hope you are having better luck with the tension.
Tension issues have got to be the MOST frustrating thing in the world. So often there doesn't appear to be any reason for them. Quilting can go fine, and then suddenly the tension go completely off. I can so relate. I hope you get them sorted out.
I'm glad you enjoyed your class, and that you did such a great job problem solving your tension issues!
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