Sunday Summary: Endings and Beginnings

Because he was out of town all last week, my dear husband brought me this beautiful bunch of flowers before he left. After a week, the daisies are still hanging in there. Such a nice man I have.

I made a huge batch of vegetable soup after making Julia Child's brown stock as a base for it. That was my dinner almost every night last week.



Aren't these wonderful dishes? I saw them at T. J. Maxx and had to have them. I love things that remind me of London. (There was also an Eiffel Tower set for you Francophiles.) My vegetable soup and toasted wheat bread with almond butter seemed to taste even better when served in them. The beaker has already provided lots of cups of tea, too.



I passed one evening sewing the binding on the One Million Books quilt.



Here's a little peak at the machine quilting. Kelly Jones at Ye Olde Forest Quilters did a wonderful job.

I started the quilt for Anna and Matt's wedding present yesterday. They already know about it. In fact, Anna picked out lots of the fabric for their quilt when she chose fabric for the wedding bento for her best friend. Pictures follow in the next post.

Machine quilting: the maiden voyage

The quilt that I made with the Girl Scouts has been sitting on my work table for several weeks now while I tried to figure out how to quilt it because of the big, painted center. I realized that machine quilting the painting would be bad for the surface, so I carefully hand quilted enough of the (painted) edges to connect all three layers. The girls are coming to our next guild meeting this Thursday and we are going to show the quilt to the rest of the guild, so that meant some form of machine quilting was going to be necessary on the pink ribbon blocks to get it finished by then. I've done several workshops on machine quilting, but this was the maiden voyage in terms of doing an entire quilt.

My old Bernina has a darning foot and when I dropped the feed dogs, it worked really well. The photo above it a close-up of the foot. It takes a little time to get a rhythm and control the flow so that you don't end up with really long stitches. A large stippling pattern seemed to look the best. The thread is an ecru machine quilting thread.



The biggest issue was manipulating the quilt and keeping my feet under the table. A chair on casters isn't the best idea for machine quilting. After about an hour, I felt like I'd been wrestling a bear!



The stippling worked really well to tack the edges of the fused ribbon blocks. The surface turned out fairly well, but my poor Bernina would not run after I cleaned and oiled it, so it is going to the sewing machine doctor tomorrow. The bias binding is all made and I will sew that on tonight.

I don't know if I will ever do this again, but it's nice to have the experience. The surface texture that hand quilting creates is tough to beat and I love the process much more than that of machine quilting.

Sue Nickels @ Gate City Quilt Guild

Photo credit: http://www.sue.nickels.com/beatles_quilt.html

Sue Nickels, co-creator with her sister Pat Holly of The Beatles quilt, presented the program at the second meeting of the Gate City quilt guild tonight. Sue and her sister are both incredibly talented quilt artists in their own rights, but are also unbeatable collaborators. The Beatles quilt won best in show at Paducah in 1998.

Sue's program was about the history of machine quilting, which is really much older than one would imagine. In their travels, Sue and Pat have collected historic examples of quilts that were machine quilted. The oldest goes back to the 1870's. Sue will be teaching at Randy's Quilt Shop in Greensboro this weekend and there are still a few places available. Her raw edge appliqué and machine quilting are stellar and I'm sure her classes will be terrific.