Quilting madness

G'day all!

Knitting has taken a back seat these last few days. The weather has been lovely and I've been outside sewing up a storm. (OK, no storms yet.) A little while ago I managed to put a quilt sandwich together for a little pinwheel quilt. Yesterday I started quilting it.

Along the way, the machine started playing up a LOT. Stupid machine! It started off so nicely and I was telling it how it was nicer than the Singer for quilting on - my Oz Janome was stippling away happily and the only major problem was the nut behind the wheel, so to speak (ie me). Then I started getting odd tension problems. Suddenly, after my third or fourth outburst of cussing at the machine and yet another round of unpicking, it makes a rather weird and scary noise and voila!

machine_oops
It spits out the needle. Yikes!

After I examined the needle carefully and declared it good, once tightened back in its holder, I had no further problems with tension until the top thread ran out.

DOH! And Scroatfight had just shut so there was no point doing an emergency run to get more cotton thread.

Here's what I've done so far:
littlepinwheels

The fabric is Eden by Lila Tueller. I got a layer cake of it a while ago. I've been following the instructions for the quilt on the Old Red Barn Co quiltalong group on Flickr and on Dana's blog. This is a small quilt - probably lap size or maybe cot size. I have a big quilt with the same sort of pinwheels only purple, green and yellow rather than pink, one that will be a nice queen size bed topper but I have not yet made a quilt sandwich (quilt top, batting/innards, backing) for it. I need to make a backing for it and find a big enough space to baste it.

In the grand tradition of not finishing the first quilt (I haven't yet, it is still waiting to be basted and quilted, as is the second quilt top and the third quilt top), I have started another quiltalong with the group. Yep, this time we are making hexagons with Jaybirdquilts!

So I grabbed my only jelly roll
hexes_jellyroll

hex_stripsb
and I chose 10 strips from it to sew together to make five paired strips
hex_stripsa

and I pressed the seams to the darker fabric

and I cut out 60 degree triangles

and lookie at all the fun things you can do!

hexes_norm
Normal hexagons (whoops, forgot to white balance that one!)

hexes_rad
Radiation warning hexagons

hexes_wheelies
Wheelie good hexagons!

It will be interesting to see where these go. I have to choose how to put them together but not quite yet - there's more options to go I think. I have to get a contrast fabric, which will be white I am pretty sure. I don't think any other neutral will look as good. We'll see what happens!

anon!

Comments

  1. Oh that's amazing, all the permutations and combinations of the shapes.
    Glad to read that your machine is NOT broken!! The quilt is looking great!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh that's amazing, all the permutations and combinations of the shapes.
    Glad to read that your machine is NOT broken!! The quilt is looking great!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Absotutely loverly! Combos of wonderful color.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oooh hexes, love them. I have a quilt pattern laying around somewhere that uses hexes of all sorts of construction to make a fabulous quilt. I will get to it someday :-)

    ReplyDelete

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