A little experimenting

A quilter phoned me last week booking quilts for this week Monday.  She then ran into a problem in not being able to find wide backings and had to order these, so no quilts on Monday.  Turned out to be a blessing in disguise as a friend whom I haven’t seen since lockdown end March said we should have some cake somewhere. It was just wonderful to sit, chat and not worry about cleaning up afterwards.

Tuesday, miserable windy day, turned out just as good as I had wine and snacks at another friend’s house. None of these is quilters so it was good to hear news from other angles and not just stay in my own little quilt world.

I ordered even more extra-wide poly-cotton fabric for quilt backings and I have a neat stack by now.  I guess I’ll have to start making quilts to be able to use these.

The booked quilter still hasn’t received her backing fabric and I decided to load and baste the train quilt.  By basting a quilt beforehand it can be easily unzipped and re-zipped onto the frame.  So if the booked quilts arrive I’d have no problem taking this one-off, knowing everything is in place and will stay that way.  This can also be done for quilters not liking sandwiching the layers but prefer to do their own free motion quilting. The basting stitch is around 1” long and will easily unpick.

After basting, being at the bottom of the quilt, I decided I might as well work my way up, changed to green thread and started quilting all the green bits.  This quilt has no recipient in mind, so I can take as long as I want to finish it and simply play with all the modes on my machine and motifs, I can do.

Done with the green and back at the top it was time to change to blue thread and work my way down again.

I’ve used the option of using lock stitches at the beginning and end of a motif for the first time on this quilt.  Previously I would tie knots in the thread and bury these between the layers.  This takes up a lot of time.  The other way I did it was to backstitch as one would do on a domestic sewing machine but I’ve noticed that when using different colour threads, the top thread would show up on the bottom, now not any more although I did not use harshly contrasting thread colours.

I’ve also used manual mode (not regulating your stitch lengths) for most of the motifs and only used regulated mode when having to use a ruler for straight lines.  I am beginning to like manual mode as the machine seems to move with much more ease than in regulated mode.

Hubby is not feeling well at all and a friend came over this afternoon and promised to send me pictures of medication she’d suggest.  She’s married to a doctor, so I might as well take her advice. I have reached the bottom of this quilt using blue but will roll back to double-check that I’ve caught all the blue areas and then we’re off to a restaurant dinner with friends.