Truss Delivery

We woke up to snow coming down again yesterday, and quite a bit of it. The first Thursday of the month is usually our quilting day at church, but we decided to cancel it. Everyone is tired of having to slog around in this. I spent the day quilting the flying geese quilt, but the big excitement was the delivery of the trusses for the shop.

The truck pulled up around 11 a.m. and the driver and the husband had a discussion about how to proceed:

They had to put chains on the truck, first. Then the husband had to plow more snow out of the way, including the snow on the road because—even though it was already 11 a.m.—we had yet to see a county snow plow. (I don’t think they ever came and plowed yesterday.)

It took a fair bit of maneuvering to get the truck backed into the driveway. Thankfully, ours is not a high-traffic road at this time of day:

Eventually, the truck was able to slide the load of trusses off:

The husband wants to get them set today. A second smaller load of trusses is coming next week. The truck driver said they were happy to get these out of the truss yard because they were taking up so much space.

I spent a good hour yesterday morning just staring at the flying geese quilt while I tried to decide how to quilt it. Once I had it under the machine, quilting loops just didn’t feel right. I thought about doing a big spiral, but that didn’t feel right, either. I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t in the mood to free motion quilt. I can free motion quilt, but I wouldn’t say that I enjoy it. I Googled walking foot quilting designs and ended up on the Crazy Mom Quilts page, where Amanda Jean Nyberg so helpfully included a screen shot of the settings on a Janome 6600P—the same machine that I have—for what she calls “honeycomb quilting.” It’s basically an elongated three-step zig-zag. I experimented with it on some scrap quilt sandwiches. She had the stitch length set at 4, which I thought was too long, so I backed it down to 3. (I want my machine quilting to look like Margaret’s hand quilting, not like my hand quilting.) I quilted parallel lines down the length of the quilt using a natural-colored 40wt thread:

And I liked the way they turned out:

When I machine quilt, I set up a small 4’ folding table behind the table that my machine sits on. That second table holds the bulk of the fabric and keeps it from pulling through the machine.

I considered quilting lines in the other direction to make a grid pattern, but this feels like plenty of quilting to me. I don’t like overly-quilted quilts that feel stiff and boardy. These lines are about an inch and a half apart and that’s plenty of quilting.

I really like this quilting stitch. It’s easy to do with the even-feed foot on my machine and while I wouldn’t say it’s faster than free-motion quilting, it’s definitely less stressful, at least for me, because I don’t have to worry about stitch tension as much. I’ll get this quilt trimmed and find some binding for it and then I can move it to the “done” pile.