Paws and Claws

My college friend, Scott, who lives in Ohio and tinkers around with sewing machines, was intrigued by the Christina Cameli bear claw quilting pattern. We’ve been e-mailing back and forth about it for the past few days. Yesterday morning, I made a quilt sandwich with some Essex Linen and sat down at the Q20 to experiment. My goal was to test out that pattern, test out some thread, and see if there were any hiccups to be dealt with before I started quilting the Bear Paw baby quilts.

I threaded the machine with a spool of Konfetti, which is a 100% cotton 50wt thread from Wonderfil, a Canadian company. The Quilt Gallery in Kalispell started carrying their thread a few months ago. I’ve been very impressed by everything I’ve tried so far. Their wooly nylon is a great serger thread. The Glamore is a nice, flexible metallic. And while I am not likely to give up my collection of Aurifil thread, the Konfetti is beautiful.

My first attempt at making bear claws looked suspiciously like the swirls I did on the red Candy Coated:

I sent a picture over to Scott. We discussed. I tried again, but this time, I made an effort to make the starting circle followed by three or four echo lines around it before moving on to the next one:

Much better. The two patterns are very closely related to each other, obviously.

The texture of the quilting on the Essex Linen is amazing.

I switched over to working on the Bear Paw baby quilt. It was slow going, mostly because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I started by quilting in the ditch around the large dark gray squares and then around all the light gray “claws.” That helped to stabilize the center of the quilt. The Essex Linen has a loose enough weave that it will stretch out of shape if you’re not careful. I want a square baby blanket, not a odd-shaped parallelogram or trapezoid.

I decided on curved lines within the dark gray squares (and the colors in this picture are very close to reality):

I’m not unhappy with this choice, but the rings need more work. I started by making them 1” apart—the width of each arc in my set of curved rulers—but I want to go back and add lines in between. The quilting needs to be a bit denser. I’m also planning 1/2” matchstick quilting in the outer teal border.

I need to get a set of echo clips for my ruler foot. The outermost ring was made with the largest curve in my set of rulers. I have no way of doing any further curves unless I freehand them, and I know better than to try. An echo clip will allow me to follow the outer line and make the next one and the next one, etc.

[I played around with the idea of making some rays extending from that outer curve—you might be able to see the lines I drew with the disappearing marker—but I didn’t like those, either.]

I decided that was enough work on that quilt. I could have done the teal sections but I was too lazy to change the thread.

After lunch, it was back to work on the Blue Thistle quilt. I started putting together the chain blocks and finished enough of them that I could lay out the first two rows of the quilt:

The chain blocks are a cream Grunge and navy blue, although that navy blue looks black in this picture.

This one will probably be assembled within the next few days, but the pile of basted tops waiting to be quilted is getting bigger and bigger. The bottleneck just moves from one spot to another.

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I went out to the chicken coop yesterday afternoon and noticed that the Light Brahma broody hen was off the nest. She hasn’t moved for almost three weeks, so I thought she had abandoned the eggs. I took them out of the box, intending to dispose of them in the woods before they exploded and made a big mess. As I was putting more pine shavings in the box, however, she came bustling over, clearly upset that I was messing around in there. And that made Dave anxious, so he came over to investigate. I hurriedly put all the eggs back in the box. When I left the coop, she was busy tucking them all underneath her again. I’ll give her a few more days and see if anything happens.