Pauline's quilt

I spent several days last week and yesterday afternoon and evening working on a quilt for a woman that works at TEA.  Her son graduated from high school and is going to University of Central Florida.  She made a beautiful quilt for him using all batiks. It is gorgeous!  She used a pattern from a Kaffe Fassett book.  She has a black batik for the backing and it's 108" wide- I love it... no seam!  I made a pantograph pattern to use, with the logo for UCF in it- a Pegasus.  It is big meandering and then the Pegasus.  I had to learn how to offset the quilting so that one row started with the Pegasus design in it and the next one started with the meandering.  Luckily for me, I found good instructions on the internet.  Now if I can just remember what to do!  :-)   I used an orange thread for the top and bobbin.  It was alot of fun.  Last night I finished it.  It really looks nice.  Hope Pauline likes it!


This shows the quilting.  Pegasus is the logo for UCF so I did continuous line quilting involving the Pegasus.



Pauline's quilt was fun working on.  I loved the batiks she chose.  Maybe some day I'll do one with batiks!

T-shirt Quilt

Friday afternoon and evening I worked on cutting apart the teeshirts and ironing the interfacing to them.  I spent 6 hours on them.  I made myself a pressing board just for this task.  I covered a piece of 1/4" plywood with a quilted silver ironing board fabric that I bought at Joanns.  It worked just great for this project!

I finished putting the interfacing on the tee blocks on Sunday afternoon.  I worked all afternoon today trimming the blocks so that they all measure 14 3/4 " (I know that's a wierd measurement... I would have liked them to be smaller, but there was one tee shirt that made it necessary for that size.)  Next step... cutting the fabric to frame each block, the sashing and the intersecting squares.

Work In Progress (WIP)

I'm working on a new quilt now. This is for some special friends of ours who have an anniversary coming up.  It's a throw size.  I put it on my frame and started following a pantograph called "Swirls".  I really enjoy using the pantographs. 

Each time I quilt is a learning experience.  With the last quilt I did, I drew up a pantograph, only to find that it was too big for my machine (meaning that I couldn't sew the whole design without having to move my quilt up on the frame.) It was 13" tall, and the throat on my machine will only accomodate a 12-12 1/4" tall one.  The next one I did, I made 7" tall.  It worked fine, but if I'd have made it 6" tall instead, I could have sewn 2 rows of the design before having to roll the quilt.  Live and learn!  With the Swirls panto, I made it so that 2 rows were 10" tall (which was nice because I could then print them off on regular computer paper.)

I had a little trouble with the first couple of rows of quilting.  It would do fine until I got to a seam, and then it really bogged down.  I thought that maybe I didn't have the take up bar (the one that is in the back that is where the 3 layers of quilt- quilt top, batting, and backing- roll onto after they have been quilted) up high enough.  I moved it up, but still had the same problem.  I then realized that a vertical bar holding the take up bar had moved and was no longer at a ninety degree angle.  I tightened that.  Still drag...   What's wrong?  I had Bill check it when he got home.  He thought that I had the take up bar too high.  I moved it back down and, "voila"!  Worked great!!!

I finished the quilting yesterday and had such a good time!  Boy, do I love this machine!

Next project?  We'll see...

By the way, I'll post pictures of this quilt later!  I don't want my friends to see it and ruin their surprise!


Now I can add the picture.  My friends just celebrated their 46th anniversary. 
I made this quilt for them because they have always enjoyed the seashore. 



Our bedspread on the frame



 The third quilt I made was actually for us, can you believe it?  I already had the top put together before I got my new machine.  I love the fabric! It's from Hobby Lobby and is brown, tan, and teal with gold metallic outlines. I had tried quilting it on the sewing machine that I had originally gotten with my new frame.  It just didn't work out.  Even though the machine had a speed control on it, my stitches were not even.  The speed control is supposed to make sure that no matter how fast or slow I am moving my machine on the frame, the stitches will all be whatever length I set them to be.  Not true with the original Babylock.  However, with my new CJ, it is beautiful!  I used a pantograph called popcorn, and a variated thread that was the same colors as the fabric!  Beautiful!  I used solid brown for the backing, so the stitching really showed up nicely!  I was amazed at how easy it was, even though the quilt is over 100" long and wide!  It took me roughly 5 1/2 hours to quilt the whole quilt!  Never could have done that without the frame!  The quilt was so heavy, it would have really been a lot of work!



The Popcorn design shows up nicely on the back