Last Day with Mom

It's been a lovely visit, though short, and it is time to go home tomorrow.  My mom loved her quilt, and the surprise visit was a hit!  I will post pictures of her and her quilt as soon as I get home.

I also had a surprise; yesterday we were able to attend a local quilt show!  I had no idea when I planned my trip that it was going on this weekend, but how neat to see what the local scene is like!  Unfortunately, despite buying a handful of raffle tickets, I didn't win a thing.  Oh well, I guess my luck ran out just being able to attend the unexpected show.   I will write more about my observations of the show later when I have more time.

Right now I am supposed to be helping my 87 year old grandma set up her new blog!  I told her how much fun I was having doing mine and she wanted one of her own.  Grandma is a literary buff and her blog will focus on writing stories and reading interesting books, and just being creative with words.  I'm hoping she will have her first post up soon.  If you are interested.....her blog site is Tell me a story

First finish of 2012!

I feel like I've been working on this thing every possible minute for the whole month!  Considering I started with a sandwich that was partially quilted at the beginning of the month, it makes me wonder if I'll ever finish any of my other UFO's!

you can sort of see the feathers in the border

view from the back corner

That gold peacock feather is actually my label.  It reads "Mom, Perfection is overrated. Learning from your mistakes is not.  This quilt is FAR from perfect, but I learned a lot making it.  I hope you enjoy it. JL 2012".

I did learn a lot making this quilt.  Many things were Newbie mistakes.  So I have started a whole new page dedicated to things I have learned.  This happens to be the first quilt featured on the page, but I'm sure there will be plenty more in the future (I seem to have enough "duh" moments to share for a lifetime!).  I have also set a copy of the page to be posted in the blog tomorrow since I will be spending the day traveling to personally deliver this quilt to my mom!  Shhh! Don't tell, it's a surprise visit!

Yes, yes, but what have you been DOING?

What have I been doing?  This week has been pretty busy!  Art with the kindergartners on Wednesday, baby home sick on Thursday, baby well on Friday so Art with 3rd graders on Friday, our usual craziness today (Saturday).  Every chance I've had to string 20 minutes together has been spent on the peacock quilt.  It is nearly done at this point; final completion should be Monday if all kids are healthy and if I can manage to quilt despite breaking the open toe free motion foot that I have only had ONE WEEK!!!  I am a little upset about this, but am trying to think of other things at the moment....

As a rule, I try not to let the fact that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing, stop me from trying new things.  In the process of finishing this quilt I have tried several new things, with moderate success.  In fact, I have learned so much making this quilt that it has inspired me to make a new page with "lessons learned"  AKA "airing my dirty laundry (with regard to quilt making only!)".  The problem is that I learned so much that I wonder if I should post a little at a time, then summarize on a page???  Decisions, decisions.  Look for posts next week after the quilt is done.

Here are some pictures of the progress.

You can see that I have marked the last little bits that I want to quilt.  I used a white sewline pencil.  Since I've made a few "dark" colored quilts thus far, I have tried a few white pencils, and I must say I like this one the best.  The ease with which the marking goes onto the fabric is what really strikes me.  And it comes off cleanly too.

Zzzzzzzz

Between staying up til midnight last night working on my peacock quilt and having a sick baby home all day, I am tired and ready to go to bed.  Of course, my 3 year old has other plans.

I have been making progress on the peacock quilt, but it is never as fast as I would like it to go.  Take for instance last night.  I decided to sew on the binding because the borders were essentially done and I doubted the quilt was going to shift any further.  I figured if I got the binding on, I could hand close it while watching my baby at home today.  Well, I got about 1/4 the way around the quilt and thought to myself, "DUH!  If there was ever a time to try machine binding, it was on this quilt!  I mean the border is a nice dark color and the back is so busy, if I made a mistake somewhere, no one would find it.  So I got the seam ripper out and took of the binding and reapplied it to the back side.  But, I wasted a good 45 minutes or so.  Today I managed to finish putting it to the top side.  While I don't mind the way it turned out on this quilt (I'll have pictures later), I'm not sure I will do every quilt this way.  There is something to be said about how neat and trim a hand applied binding looks.

I have a few more things left to do on the quilt before it is finished.  There are a couple of spots in the border that I need to redo, I need to add the label, and I wanted to add a couple of things to top in some of the squares between the blocks.  Since I have already done all the in-the-ditch quilting, I'm not worried about shifting, so I saved those sections for last in case I didn't have time.

Hopefully, tomorrow I can accomplish those items before I go teach art to 3rd graders.  I taught the stick project to the Kindergartners on Wednesday and they really seemed to enjoy it.  It was rather messy, no doubt adding to their pleasure.  I think it took me and the 2 volunteers about as long to clean up as it took to teach the class.

I can hear that our evening TV show is coming to an end, so it's time to put the girls to bed and get there myself.  Zzzzzzzz.... I am ready!

Unexpected time

My husband packed up the kids for a "trip" to the office.  Evidently, he needed something that couldn't wait.  Regardless of the reason, it gave me some alone time on a Sunday!  So, I went straight to work too!

I ripped out the rest of my tension mistake from yesterday.  Man-o-man! That was a tedious task.  I hope I never have to do that again.  I've only been working on the green sections of the blocks of the peacock quilt, but today I finished them (including the one I had to redo).  Determined not rip out the teal sections because I wasn't sure what thread color I wanted, I made a couple little samples to test the colors out.  

I did say "little" samples

This one was just plain aqua embroidery thread

This one actually has two different variegated threads

Which one did I choose?  Well, I ended up going with the variegated with the lightest shade.  It is a peacock quilt after all, I need some pizazz. It also seemed to go with the thread I choose for the green blocks best.  Here are pics of those:

"green block"

close up of quilting -  I'm still practicing!

"teal block"

close up of final thread selection

I think they look good together

While this isn't the practice pattern for the free motion challenge, it is still practicing free motion quilting!!  Speaking of practice, now I only have 14 more teal blocks to go, then I have to quilt some of the other parts of the blocks (I'm definitely choosing a bigger quilting pattern), then the borders....hmm, this could take a while.

I don't know who got more action tonight

I don't know who got more action tonight, my sewing machine or my seam ripper. I'm still not sure what happened, other than something went wrong. I try to make it a habit to check my tension whenever I put in a new bobbin, retread my needle, etc. I'm not sure if I forgot or what, but after quilting several blocks on the peacock quilt, I had one where the tension was all messed up. Of course, it was only showing on the bottom, so it wasn't until I was completely done with that block that I discovered it. I did a few more tension tests, which had strange results, so I figured the only solution was to replace the needle and retread everything. Magically, the new tension test showed I should be on my usual number for quilting. But now I have to rip out that entire block, and it's heavily quilted. Nice. I only got 1/4 of it ripped out and I needed to call it a night. My eyes were crossing. Ripping out takes longer than the quilting. Ugh.