A finish!!

My friend, Doreen, whom I met when I was doing my block drive for Hurricane Sandy relief, stopped by last Friday.  It was great catching up - she lives in Minnesota and I live in Virginia, so we don't see each other often, as you can imagine!

Anyway, I mentioned wanting to go ahead and machine quilt some quilts, rather than poke along with my hand quilting on everything.  Not that I'm giving up hand quilting - I love it too much to do that! - but it would be nice to have a few more finishes under my belt instead of just flimsies.  It turns out she's been teaching free motion quilting, so she gave me some pointers and a pep talk.

On Saturday, I put on my big girl panties and gave it a try.  I changed the needle, I dropped the feed dogs, I fiddled with the tension, and I doodled all over a little quilt sandwich I had made for that purpose.  I had fun, but I definitely need to do more practice before I actually use free motion quilting on a real quilt.

So, the feed dogs came back up and I gave the wavy stitch on my machine a try.

I really like the way it turned out!  And I love the fact that I had quilted a whole quilt in a matter of just hours!

Yesterday I sewed the binding onto the front and today I hand stitched it down to the back.

A finish!  This one has to be a record for me - I started this project on Labor Day, just 16 days ago!

Time to get my Charlie Brown Quilt ready for quilting, I guess.

Labor Day Labors

Oh, the blog posts I have written in my head in the past month and a half!  But how many did I actually type out and add photos to?  None!  I'm such a lazy slacker sometimes!  Before I opened my shop three years ago, I blogged almost religiously.  I think it was because I spent so much time on the computer for work that it was no big deal to log in for pleasure, too.  Now, I spend just minutes a day on the computer, and most of that is for bookkeeping purposes, so blogging isn't just at my fingertips - I have to consciously carve out time and pull out the laptop.  It's a shame because I get a lot of enjoyment out of blogging, both the writing and the reading.

Anyway, folks always ask me, as I am sure they do you, "how long does it take to make a quilt?"  A while ago, I started documenting my time in the sewing room - how much time I spent there and what I did while I was down there.  Usually, I work on several projects at a time, so it is hard to say exactly how much time was spent on any one project, but this weekend, I made a baby quilt top, start to finish, without working on anything else at the same time.  The amount of focus that took for me almost killed me!!

I certainly didn't need a new project - I have plenty in progress right now - but I was perusing simple baby quilt photos online, just for kicks.  I came across this photo:

Zig Zag Zoom Quilt Photo Credit

Thinking about a stack of bright geometric 6.5" squares I had, I decided to make a block.

My block finishes at 10.5" with a 6.5" square and 2" squares & strips

Easy peasy, so I decided to make the whole quilt, not realizing that I didn't have enough of my white background fabric to complete the borders as they were done in the quilt photo.  I did what I could, but I'm not sure how I feel about the final result - it seems a little incomplete to me, too narrow and unbalanced.

Finished size (for now) 35" x 52"

That's what I get for not following an actual pattern with fabric requirements and all.  Oh well.  I'm going to let this sit a bit and see how I feel about it later.  I may take off the two sides strips and incorporate another white-on-white background fabric to make the borders the same all the way around.  What say you?  Is it worth the frogging and the substituting of another fabric to make it more like my inspiration quilt in the photo?

Either way, I can actually give someone an answer when they ask me how long it takes me to make a quilt top.  This one is smaller than quilts I usually make, and with bigger pieces, so I'd say most of my quilt tops take longer, but this one took me 8.25 hrs.  Not bad for a full day's "labor"!

I'm linking up with Oh Scrap and Monday Making.