I guess it's the quilt top?

Remember last week, when I breezed through quilting a small quilt with nary a snag?

Well, this week, I am wrestling with my fusible applique quilt from the Faustino workshop, and I've got breaking threads every few minutes and it's driving me NUTS. There are no photos as yet, it will have to wait until the quilt's finished. The only difference is that the entire quilt top is backed with fusible web, and I'm guessing that's what's giving me the trouble. I switched to a larger topstitch needle, and that didn't help at all.

To get away from the machine for a bit and calm down,  I did some doodling last night. I have a picutre of that, at least.

Iron Craft 2011 Challenge

To prove my utter insanity, I am taking the Iron Craft challenge for 2011, which is to create a craft every week (or as many as humanly possible) for the entire year. I've already missed the first one, since I found out about it just a couple of days ago, and we'll see how I do with this week's challenge, which is to make a door jamb draft blocking device.

We really need these. So much so that my husband went out and purchased a pair of commercially-made draft protectors 2 days ago! (They do work, but I don't like how they obstruct the door operation).

Quilting practice

Before I tackle any of my pieced quilts, I wanted to practice my free-motion quilting. So I cut out a couple of 20" diameter circles and "sketched with thread". I think I'm improving - the machine was acting great with no snags or bad stitches on the underside. One of the things that I paid attention to was slowing down - that made a big difference.

I also tried out the water-soluble marker, which worked amazingly (hence the dark areas on the quilt; the fabric was wet when I took the photos. Ironically, I didn't use any of the markings for the quilting, as I wasn't happy with what I drew. So this design was completely spontaneous while I was quilting. I used some cheap poly batting scraps I had laying around, but doubled to give the piece some loft and make the feathers and larger shapes "pop".

I'll be finishing the binding at the guild meeting tonight, and at the Garden State Quilters' show in May, this little quilt will be in the "little wishes" raffle (we raffle off a lot of small quilts during the show). I may also display it at the Harvest Quilter's show in March, depending on what's finished in my show queue.

Happy New Year!

I've been remiss recently. I've had some good excuses - I was in costume-mode for a couple of months this fall, making outfits for a full production of Romeo & Juliet, where my output was at least as prolific as a contestant on Project Runway with the added excitement of holding a full-time job at the same time.

I only returned to the sewing machine last week, where I banged out a quilt top for the Harvest Quilter's 2011 challenge. I am still mulling over how to quilt it. I will have to get a move on with that; the quilt show is in March. The challenge fabric is the blue & white stripe with the red flowers. I think the piece I was given was slightly less than 1/8 yard, and it's something that I would never purchase for my stash on my own. I might wear a bathing suit made of that print once I lose 60 pounds, but it's definitely not "me".

Other rules for the challenge was the overall size must be under 180" in total circumference, and can not use more than 5 additional fabrics. (The fabrics I've chosen are behind the challenge fabric).

A further constraint that I put on myself is that I could only use fabrics already extant in my stash. I did a little bit of fabric purchasing over the holidays (right after the Hoffman Challenge for 2011 fabric was announced), and I don't have room to store what I bought already. I'm using a medium-blue batik, a dark blue Hoffman print from around 10 years ago that I adore,  and a light-blue fabric from the Beatles' Yellow Submarine collection that came out a few years ago. the red and green were FQ prints that I picked up somewhere along the way.

I designed my quilt in EQ7, using mostly blocks from their block library. The borders are my own design.

The center blocks are called Staccato Corner (and are supposed to be part of a border pattern), the surrounding blocks are Thrifty. The corner blocks in the border are 3" Double Monkey Wrench, and the border design is of my own devising.

Of course, I realized, after it was "too late," that  I should have foundation-pieced the Double Monkey Wrenches, as working on tiny blocks like that is challenging to get things perfect. One would think I knew this already from my Chaos Theory quilt.

 

The other issue is the center. As you may have noticed, there are 32 separate pieces of fabric coming together in one single point at the center of this quilt. I don't think I will be able to get my quilting foot under that at all when I quilt this, so I need to come up with something that doesn't require stitching around the center of the quilt.


The center blocks were paper pieced.

I am also writing up this pattern. This time I took some decent notes as I was constructing each block, so I should have the pattern done fairly soon.

I have some ambitious plans for quilting in 2011 - there are 2 local guild shows this spring that I'll be making new quilts for, and I really want to get something entered in the Hoffman Challenge this year, and some other surprises in the works. I also plan to blog more regularly. So, till next time, keep on quilting!

Western Electric 2B708408 , circa 1917-1918

Shirley, my mother-in-law handed me this heavy wooden case probably 7 years ago, when they were packing up their house to downsize into an apartment in a Senior building. I had opened it, and I knew it was an old sewing machine. It wasn't a treadle machine which I had been desiring for a while, and the wiring frankly looked terrifying, so I put it away in the basement and basically forgot about it. It wound up in the garage during the move almost 4 years ago, and I finally opened it up and really took a look at it today, while sorting through our stuff for a garage sale in a couple of weeks.

This is what I found (click to embiggen):

There is a compartment at the back of the machine with a sliding cover. Inside what I thought was a bag of needles, were also two bobbins, a hemming foot, and the quilting attachments!


I was thinking simply about selling this, but the people at quiltingboard.com have convinced me to have it restored instead. There is a gentleman there who does this work for a very reasonable amount of money (thankfully, because I think the shipping costs are going to be outrageous - this thing weighs a TON), and had already offered to spruce the old girl up.

From some quick research on the Internet, I managed to find the owner's manual on line, which is great because it explains how to care for the machine, how to thread it, wind bobbins and use the attachments.

The serial # is on the motor only and is 2B708408. I could not find anything on line indicating when it was made specifically. However, I did discover that National Sewing Machine made the actual sewing machine (and put the W.E. label on it) in their factory in Illinois, and Western Electric made the motor.

The motor is stamped with a patent date of May 22, 1917, and the website that told me about the mfr of the machine itself said that Western Electric stopped making these in 1918. So it seems that the machine was built in 1917 or 1918, and I may not necessarily find out exactly when.

Of course, it's got that "fussy" bobbin casing that I hate, and hopefully it won't give me a lot of tsuris when I try to use it. It may be a very nice machine to teach people with; I doubt that it runs terribly fast, and I expect it to be a fun and relaxing machine to use for piecing.

I also like how it's about the same age as my house, so it kind of "matches". I am looking forward to using it. Maybe I'll have it back in time for my birthday!

Finally got to play with fabrc over the weekend!

I had an opportunity to take a much-needed break from the recovery (reorganizing) from all the renovations, and attended the Anna Faustino workshop that one of my guilds held yesterday. She taught us her "no sew" fabric weaving techniques. It took me about 5 hours to make this:

Of course all the prep work was done ahead of time by Ms Faustino; which consisted of a whole lot of accurate drawings on fusible web, and then fusing the web to the black fabric. We were doing the cutting and the weaving.

I still have to finish this piece - I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet in terms of quilting or embellishments. I may even add a border or something, since it's maybe 36" square at this point.

I hope to return to regular blogging now that things are almost back to "normal"... I'm back on costume duty again, for the fall production at the High School: Romeo & Juliet, so I don't know if I'll be doing much quilting in the next few months or not.

I had a blog on vox.com

They are shutting down tomorrow, so I am trying to move it over here. It was effortless to move it to a TypePad blog: Quiltiliciousjourney.blogspot.com's typepad blog aka thevoxwoman.typepad.com but I'm having a heckuva time trying to import it over here. It's rather annoying, actually.

Anyway, this other blog has posts from 2007-2009. I don't think it's going to import here. Not with a couple of mouse clicks, anyway. Blogger is looking for an XML file and typepad and vox are providing me with TXT files.