Yay, Another Quilt Finished!

One busted machine later, I am finally done!  This turned out to be an experimental quilt for me -- I did some pretty ambitious (for me) quilting that I enjoyed immensely.  My technique did improve significantly toward the end of the quilt, so more than ever I'm a proponent of "practice, practice, practice!"

These are the feather details I'm happy to show -- some of the earlier feathers on this quilt do not stand up to close scrutiny.  I chose to do the feathers on the patterned parts and stippling on the solid white, whereas it might make more sense to do this in the reverse.  I thought since I am fairly new at FMQ, doing the more detailed work on the patterned sections would be more forgiving.

Feather detail on one of the bottom triangles.

Feather detail on corner triangle.

Since it took me so long to quilt this darn thing, I decided to go with a machine binding technique that I read about here on Red Pepper Quilts.  I do love the look of hand binding, but I gotta say, this technique is SO much faster. 

The stitch-in-the-ditch on the front binding blended in well after washing.

Top-stitching detail on the back side of the binding that results from machine binding.

All in all, I'm happy with how this quilt turned out and am even more excited to move on to new projects (and other WIPS).  PS. I love, love, love my new Janome 6600!

Some Bad News and Some Good News

Working hard on getting all my points to meet!

Wow, I can't believe how quickly the summer is moving along.  It seems like the boys just got out of school, and all of a sudden, over half the summer is already gone.

On the sewing front, I had some bad news.  I was busy quilting my Spirit Charm quilt -- it was sort of rough going at first because I had never attempt to quilt a full-sized quilt before.  Some of my early attempts at feathers were a bit shaky, but I started getting the hang of it after a while.  Well, about 2/3 of the way through, my machine died.  I guess it was taking quite a beating.  So that was the bad news.

Now the good news.  I took the plunge and bought a new machine, a Janome Memory Craft 6600P.  I really wanted the Horizon, but I couldn't justify paying twice as much for the Horizon, as beautiful as it is.  That's not to say the 6600 isn't a wonderful machine.  It's got all the options I want, except it's a little smaller than the Horizon (9-inch sewing space as opposed to 11 inches on the Horizon), but hey, it's still 3 inches bigger than my old Necchi!  Plus I guess the Horizon has an auto-tension feature that's super cool too.  Anyhoo, my machine is on order so hopefully I'll be able to post some time next week when it arrives.

In the meantime, I'll post a couple of blocks I've been working on.  Both these were done partially on my old machine, and partially on my mom's little Brother.  The Brother is a little plastic computerized machine that my mom uses only for the buttonhole function, preferring mostly to sew on an industrial Singer.  It actually sews really well; I was also able to finish a pair of PJs for #2.  BTW, the Singer is the one I learned to sew on growing up.  I remember we got it when I was in about kindergarten, so it must be 30 years old or more.

The block below is for a quilt from a quilt called "Jitterbug," from Layer Cake, Jelly Roll & Charm Quilts by Pam and Nicky Lintott.  I'm using a jelly roll of Punctuation by American Jane.  I've had it for a while but was kind of iffy about some of the prints and colors when I bought it.  Now, when I see all the prints together, in combination with the white Kona, I'm really liking how it's all coming together.

I love how the colors are coming together -- Punctuation by American Jane.

This second block, the ubiquitous bow tie, is a mere 6.5 inches, unfinished.  I was playing with some scraps and wanted to see how difficult it would be to put these together.  Each bow tie block uses two 2-inch solid square, plus and two 2-inch and two 1-inch squares of print.  It's a great stash buster, definitely.
 

You might recognize these fabrics from other projects.