Author: Teresa

Quilts, good books and dogs. Plus a cup of tea. Life is good.

Improving my FMQ skills

July 15, 2024
Quilt sample showing spiral meander pattern
Improving my spiral meander FMQ with each section I quilt

This is my second quilt using the spiral meander FMQ design. (My first attempt actually turned out fine – especially after the quilt was laundered.) The stitches here are more consistent, as are the size and spacing of the spirals. I also switched back to using Glide thread – which my machine really seems to prefer.

While sewing down the binding, I experienced a mishap with my machine, which I thought was going to require a visit to see Mr. Marc. I managed to get the machine to sew again, but a series of broken needles had already wreaked havoc on the bobbin case (my own fault for not remembering to change the needle plate). See the white “knots” in the picture? A new bobbin case and switching to purple tip needles took care of those.

Sadie and I had a therapy dog visit on Saturday at Gigi’s Playhouse in Roswell. Afterwards, Sadie & I paid a visit to the new Sew Sew Studio Duluth location. These folks are also a Janome dealer and I spent my birthday money on the specialty ruler work foot (offers greater visibility), a replacement FMQ bobbin case plus some accessories for my Elnita EC that my local dealer said weren’t available.

I have been happily stitching away this hot, steamy Sunday afternoon. I can’t wait to share the finished trio of quilts in a few days!

A picture of a sewing machine set up for machine quilting.
My set-up for free motion quilting

Excited for what’s next

July 10, 2024

Last night hubs and I celebrated my birthday at The Blue Ridge Grille in Buckhead. It’s one of our favorite places to celebrate extra special events. The food and service were superb, as usual. I think the last time we were there was to celebrate hubs retiring from Home Depot. That’s been well over two years ago.

Anyhow, this particular birthday meant I finally achieved the “magic age” for my teacher retirement benefits to kick in. (No more mortgage level health insurance premiums either!) We celebrated what’s ahead as we finally exit the holding pattern we’ve been in the past two years. Retirement officially begins August 1st.

We don’t expect much to change when it comes to our day-to-day activities. We’re just excited to have the funds previously earmarked to pay exorbitant health insurance premiums now available to tackle some minor home improvement projects and put toward a couple more bucket list trips. Sadie is also slated to get a new dogmobile (my SUV) by year end.

We’ve also started thinking seriously about where we’d like to live in retirement. That’s a tough one. We love our location and neighborhood, but are not happy about future plans for our area. I’ll be attending a DOT open house today about the future express lanes coming to the top end of I-285. I’m curious to see how they plan to add toll lanes in each direction with all the multimillion dollar homes along the proposed path between Vinings and Sandy Springs. I’m more interested in how the planned entrance/exit ramp less than 1 mile from our home will impact the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

Dining table decorated for birthday celebration
Cute table decorations that greeted us when celebrating my birthday!

Time to get busy quilting

July 7, 2024
Quilting a quilt using a sewing machine.
Machine quilting my jelly roll race quilt in using an elongated wavy stitch pattern.

It’s hot outside. I can’t think of a better way to keep cool than to spend afternoons in my basement sewing space diligently chipping away at the pile of tops needing to be quilted. The pictured quilt is a version of the Jelly Roll Race 2 quilt using one of three Liberty of London jelly rolls I purchased from Mostly Mutts Marketplace back in April. I have two more tops to quilt made from the remaining jelly rolls. Each quilt top is a different design, but all three will share the same backing and binding fabrics. This one was quilted using my walking foot and the long, curvy stitch 99 on my Janome 8900. The other two will provide me with some much needed FMQ practice. All will be donated to my guild’s community service partners.

At the last community service sew day, one of my bee group members presented me with a floral charm pack and challenged me to see what I could do with it without spending any money. My personal challenge has been to make donation quilts using existing stash, fabrics procured from the free table or given by friends as much as possible. Here’s a disappearing 4 patch based off something I saw on Pinterest. It uses the floral charm pack, along with some batiks and white background from my stash. It’s now also ready for quilting. I didn’t spent any money on the top, but I did buy backing fabric on sale at Hobby Lobby.

Quilt top in a disappearing four patch design
Disappearing four patch quilt design inspired by a photo found on Pinterest!

Personally, I’m on a mission to complete the half-done quilt tops and get the stack of completed tops quilted ASAP. Larger quilt tops will be sent to a long armer and I’ll do the rest myself (practicing various FMQ motifs learned in class). At the moment, I have no plans to replace my Janome 8900, as my system of piecing on a FW or small Elna and reserving the 8900 for borders and machine quilting seems to be working well.