Quilt Again...With Cat...

So this first picture isn't the quilt, but the cutest picture of a cat helping me sew. Pearl loves to help. Helps all she can. Here she is keeping the fabric nice and warm for me before I made the Ukulele Case. I count on all that help. I wanted to write a post about checking the links on my blog because today I checked them and had to take about 6 links down due to either missing blogs or blogs so out of date (over a year) as to be no longer active at all. Sorry to see these blogs go, and perhaps I may decide to do the same myself one of these months, you never know. So if you see that your blog is gone, and you didn't realize that there was problem in the linkage, let me know! So O.K., here is another photo of the quilt. THE QUILT, as in the first whole huge large quilt I ever made. As I have said in the past, it only took my about 19+ years to finish all the way. I am still amazed that a person can learn to free motion quilt and assemble a quilt all themselves and do it on a home sewing machine. And of course, once you do you are hooked. Absolutely hooked. So I am now cutting strips to make two slightly-larger-than-lap quilts out of all the flannel I have left from several years of jammie making. We'll see how these fabrics can work up into some sort of design overall. Keep your radios tuned to this station.

Flying Geese Quilt is done...

After nineteen years in the making, the flying geese are flown! I used a high loft poly batting and the backing is the 108" fabric from Joann's in blue paisley. The border on the two long sides is a white with navy tiny print and the binding is the reverse - a tiny white on dark navy. Those two fabrics were in my mother's fabric piles after she passed away, and I have had them as well as a few of her quilting cottons that were in smaller pieces. Some are in this quilt. So this is a work of tribute to my mother, who was a better quilter than I will ever be, but who didn't like the quilting part of it, whereas I love the free motion quilting. I have to say I liked applying the binding as well. It took many viewings of several videos on binding to get the full picture of appying the machine binding. I wanted to have it all by machine - no hand quilting here.  One place I have found great videos is The Missouri Quilt Company  website. Great stuff, and great gals there. There is a tutorial on the Flying Geese that is terrific. I didn't use it though because I had finished the top a long time ago - about five years or so ago. Watch the several links I am including on binding, and you can see the two ways of doing it - machine and hand, and then all machine. I love it all by machine. Wendy Butler Berns on Craftsy does it all by machine, and I love her classes. Her Machine Quilting class is terrific.

Next project up is a couple of warm jammie fabric quilts made from scraps and length of fabric left over from the several pair of knit and flannel jammies I have made my grandsons over the last 9 years or so. I have a lot left over, so this should be a design challenge as well as a major winter project for me. I start the cutting this week. It will be some sort of wide strip or wonky block quilt - I haven't decided on the design, but I can't follow patterns as I want to do it all myself from start to finish, and I am not good at measuring or at calculating and the thought of following a pattern meticulously makes my head throb, so I will be jotting up a few designs and getting on with it later in the week. So many people on the PatternReview site have been more than helpful to me in the quilting endeavor, and I have made some good friends in the quilting world.

LEDs make it all visible!

Just a short post to write a bit of praise for my new 50 LED sewing light! This first picture is the machine with the machine's light and the new LED lamp. You can't see the lamp because it has a completely flexible neck, and I have it positioned in back of the machine. You can see the base of the lamp - just a curved slice viewable through the inner area of the machine at the back on your right. The base is a silver disk. The lamp has a very long name. It is the NewerTech NuGreen Flexible Neck LED Desk Lamp.    After Looking around a lot, and using various OTT lights, which I still like very much, I settled on trying this lamp because of the flexibility.

The base turned out to be wider and heavier than the OTT light bases, which supports the flexibility of the neck well, and the lamp doesn't pitch off a table or over on its side when  you use a stretched position for the light. Another shot here shows the position of the lamp behind the machine - nothing in the way of your fabric or your vision while sewing. I do have a problem in the depth of the area behind my machine though, and am going to have to think of a way to reposition the table a bit for larger projects.

Another Lutterloh Shirt, a Rayon Skirt and Sewing Machine Love...

A finished Lutterloh shirt - the second time around, and this time in a rather flashy Amy Butler print I had purchased on sale a few years back. Here is the original post about the black and white shirt. I didn't alter the pattern, as I like the rather unfitted very early 90s-ness of this pattern. After doing buttonholes and buttons, I am finished running my new machine through its paces. The machine has now finished 8 projects since I got it in June, and now I can put it back to the purpose I bought it for, namely to do my quilting. So, that means finish the binding on the quilt I have already quilted and then get busy on the next quilt!    I also add an illustration of the shirt pattern here for your enjoyment.

Meanwhile, I have also made a rayon skirt on the machine - here is the fabric, but I have no picture of the skirt - it is another second time around Lutterloh pattern, and a simple skirt to make with either two pieces or three if you need to cut two halves of the back to use a small cut of fabric, which is what I did do this time. The rayon is the perfect fabric for this A line skirt. I bought a top with a half cowl neckline to match this shirt. Knit top, tunic actually. Good old Land's End.

I can say that I am seriously happy and satisfied with the Janome Memory Craft 6300.  A few of the things that are different on this machine: you need to turn it on with the presser foot in the down position. I don't know why, but you do. If you don't - it tells you so and tells you to put that foot down and turn it on again. :) Then there is getting used to the knee lift and the thread cutter - neither of which you want to try while the machine is running! Makes sense, but it took me some focus on what I was doing to make this second nature. Running through 8 sewing projects in this little time frame was good for me because I had to do buttonholes, I had to do whatever it took, and the machine is able to flawlessly sew over multiple layers, over delicate fabrics and heavier fabrics, and then turn around and make really nice auto buttonholes! When you have the sensor buttonhole selected (the one where you put the button in the back and it knows how big to make the buttonhole) it automatically cuts the thread for you after the buttonhole. very slick feature! You can also adjust both the density of the buttonhole stitching and the width of each arm (leg? side?)of the buttonhole! WOW.