Then I wanted to try some free-motion quilting. To practice I had heard somewhere that pre-printed panels were quick and easy to use. I remembered I had one that I got in a fabric grab bag that I would never use for anything. I got some batting and backing fabric and pinned it all together. Then I went at it with the sewing machine. I found the feed dog cover for my machine and I had gotten a darning foot a while ago. Free-motion stitching is really bizarre. The fabric just sits there unless you're moving it. Working out the timing of how fast to move the fabric and how fast to move the needle is tricky. And my machine does not have a very sensitive pedal so I can pretty much go fast and super-fast. Fortunately fast is a good speed for machine quiting and I started to feel like I was doing all right pretty quickly.
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First I tried outling the baby's face which didn't go that well. Then I did some of the swirls around the sides. In the blue section at the bottom I made stars that came out really well but are very hard to make out in the photo. Then I wrote my name along the bottom. Woohoo.
So today I took my quilt, backing and batting the The Quilting Loft to use their workroom to pin it all together. It was a lot more comfortable then crawling around on the floor. I got some cool green variegated thread to use for the top and some plain white for the bottom. When I got home I started quilting it. I've only done about six straight lines of quilting so far to begin to stabilize the whole thing. Then I'm going to flip it over and do some free-motion quilting around the cow spots on the back.
I also spent some time last night and tonight tacking down the binding on the Simple Zen quilt. It's still taking forever but my stitching looks remarkably better. I still can't miter a corner worth a damn. Hopefully I'll have this one finished on Tuesday and will post some pictures.
My Welsh socks should be finished shortly and the spider monkey still needs a lot more sewing. I'm currently knitting the tail.
