A Bright and Happy Quilt

I have days when I have a plan and days when I know I want to do something, but I’m not sure what. After the husband left for work yesterday morning, I cleaned up the kitchen, started the laundry, and went up to look at my fabric room. I thought I might quilt one of the charity quilts, but the Scrapper’s Delight version 2.0 hollered at me. This is a quilt (pattern in Sunday Morning Quilts) to replace a similar quilt we currently have on our bed on top of the duvet. The existing quilt is 72” x 72”. This one is 96” x 96” and has been under construction for two or three years now. I added blocks as I had scraps. A few weeks ago, I sewed everything together, got a backing, then took it up to the church and laid it out on the fellowship hall floor to baste it.

[I am going to have to do that with Cobbles, too, because of the size. I got a notice yesterday that the wideback fabric I ordered had shipped.]

I pulled out a cone of rainbow variegated Signature 40wt and some Aurifil to match the backing and got to work. I am quilting loops, of course.

With the leaves of the table up, the quilt has plenty of room to move despite being so big.

I was able to get a third of this quilted yesterday afternoon, although it took me a bit of time to get started. I had put a Schmetz chrome needle in the machine—the chrome coating is supposed to better for high-speed quilting—but I kept getting skipped stitches. I took that needle out and tried another from the package. Same problem. I took everything apart, cleaned out the hook area, oiled thoroughly, and put a regular quilting needle into the machine. That combination of steps took care of the problem and I had no more skipped stitches.

I had a similar problem in my Janome with a nonstick needle. I am starting to wonder if the chrome/nonstick coatings make the needle so slick that it can’t pick up the bobbin thread correctly. That is something I’m going to have to investigate further.

I was a few minutes into this when I realized just how much I was enjoying the bright prints. A neutrals quilt like Cobbles has plenty of visual interest, but this riot of color made my brain happy. I am hoping to finish quilting it today.

And just as I had hoped, a few days “off” gave me the mental space I needed for some new design ideas. I plan to play around with one in particular this weekend.

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My friend Elaine sent me the link to Farmer Derek Klingenberg’s website where there is a bald eagle webcam. (He’s in Kansas.) In between quilting sessions, I took breaks and watched the eagle in its nest.

The husband thinks we would get all sorts of traffic if we started a YouTube channel with webcams of the chickens and pigs. He even suggested putting GoPros on the pigs’ heads, but it would only take about 30 seconds for them to start chewing the cameras off of each other.

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Ali is going to come over this weekend for a sewing session. She has the same serger I do, and she’d like to start making some clothes for herself and her little guy. I figured that while we were sewing, the husband and the little guy could watch heavy equipment failure videos on YouTube and talk about excavators.