Month: February 2009

freehand quilting · longarm quilting · machine quilting · quilting

Wednesday WIP, 2-25-09

Wild Rose Quilter13 Comments

Still working on Spiderman.  What I thought was going to be “light custom” is taking me much longer than I expected.  This is part of the longarm learning curve I am still trying to get around, determining what quilting goes in which pricing level.  This one is much more time consuming than I had envisioned it.  But live and learn.  I find these kind of quilts quite challenging to begin with, and I just hope my customer likes how I have decided to quilt it.  I am quilting word related to Spiderman, and the child’s name in the outer borders, along with some spiders, and then just an angular meander around that.

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I am putting four spider webs, in the four corners of the inner borders, treating them as one, then doing the same angular meander in between the webs.  For the very inner blue border, I just did a good old puzzle meander in the red thread.

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I decided to do a bit of outlining on Spiderman, and will quilt on the webs behind him, in the center panel.  I still have some outlining to finish, and I think I will connect the spiders with a wave black line.

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Yeah…”light” custom….well, I’ll know better next time…lol.  If it has Dorothy and her little dog on it, or cartoon characters, etc., unless doing a pantograph allover, it’s full custom. 🙂

quilting

Stash Report and Thanks to the Princess

Wild Rose Quilter6 Comments

The stash report remains unchanged for the 2nd week in a row.  All my quilting efforts recently are customer quilting related.  Hopefully, I will have Spiderman finished soon, and will post some pics of  him when I’m done.

Today, I want to give a shout out to my friend, Princess, and thank her for teaching me how to make popcorn in the microwave, using regular popcorn and paper sacks.  Awesome!  (If you click on the link “Princess”, it will take you straight to her instructions for making the popcorn.)

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I put a smidge too much butter and salt on this batch, but it was my first try, so I will do better next time.  Other than that, it worked great, and the bites that did not have too much butter and salt were delicious! I have some butter flavored popcorn oil, and I’m wondering what would happen if I put a little of that on the kernels prior to popping.  I may try that next time, also, and if it works, maybe I can just put salt on it, and no melted butter.  I’ll let you know how that works.

health · quilting

Ankle Fusion Anyone?

Wild Rose Quilter11 Comments

Well, after years of suffering with a bad ankle that is getting progressively worse, it looks like my husband may be facing an ankle fusion.  I’ve been quite preoccupied with this worry recently, and it’s part of my lack of blog postings.  Nothing I read about it looks like fun.  But he can’t keep on like he is, as it’s getting almost impossible for him to even get around on it. He is at the doctors in Amarillo today, while I am here looking up scary things on the internet.  Access to lots of information can be a good thing, and a bad thing.  But I tend to want to read it all, or hear it all, so, if anyone has any personal ankle fusion experience they would like to share with me, either publicly or privately, I’d be interested to hear it.  If you want to share, but prefer to keep it private, just post a comment asking me to contact you back, and I will respond to your comment via email.  From what I’ve read, I understand recovery is quite lengthy.  I’m trying to convince him, though, that if it will result in easing the tremendous, life sucking amount of pain he is currently in, that it will be worth it in the long run.  And that’s all I have for today.

longarm quilting · quilt top · quilting · quilts · stash busting

Just Catching Up A Little

Wild Rose Quilter8 Comments

I hope everyone had a good weekend! I was going to do a Valentine’s Day post, and just never got around to it.  I also didn’t get around to my stash report yesterday, but it’s unchanged from last week, so no biggie there.  Thanks to everyone who participated in my thread discussion.  I enjoyed reading the comments.  I spent most of Valentine’s Day working on a customer quilt and/or playing with my new IPOD Touch, that my sweetheart gave me for Valentine’s.  My son gave me some candy and an ITunes gift card.  He helped me get it set up, and we went through his song library and transferred what I wanted from his list, and then he taught me how to get my own music.  There are times when it’s really helpful to have a teenager in the house. 🙂

The customer quilt is a rather challenging one for me, as it’s completely outside of my tastes, but perfect for the youngster who will be ending up with it.  Say hello to Spiderman.

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My customer wants “light custom” that includes some spiderwebs. Cross your fingers for me that my interpretation of that meets her expectations.

Of course, yesterday was the Daytona 500, so I watched that.  It’s always kind of a let down when those races that you expect to have an exciting finish, end under a red flag due to rain.  Congratulations to Matt Kenseth.  At least it wasn’t Kyle Busch one of the drivers that I can’t stand that won. 🙂

My son made a new discovery this week that tickled us both.  Starburst came out with FaveReds.  A bag of all the yummy “red” flavors, with none of the yucky ones in there.

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Hope you have a good week ahead! I need to go spend some quality time with Spiderman.

quilting

Thread Tales

Wild Rose Quilter17 Comments

Oh boy, oh boy, ohhhhh boy…

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Ohhhh, So Fine, so pretty!

My blog has been kind of boring lately.  I am still battling sinus headaches, and just feeling completely drained lately.  So, I thought I might liven things up by inviting you to participate in a thread discussion with me.  All of the above thread is So Fine, a beautiful polyester thread from Superior Threads.  I love this thread.  It comes is so many beautiful colors, and is perfect for that quilting where you need a thinner thread.  One example would be motifs that require a lot of backtracking.  With a thinner thread, the thread buildup is not as noticeable.  So what are we discussing?  What are your favorite threads and why? Are you a cotton purist? Or do believe the more kinds of thread the better? Do you love lots of color, or prefer muted, neutral colors for quilting thread?  I have some customers that don’t care what type thread I use on their quilts, and some that want cotton only.  I love Signature cotton and King Tut cotton.  There are some quilts that I much prefer to use my Signature cotton, as I want the stitching to really show up.  I like prominent quilting stitches in many of my quilts.  The poly’s seem to have many more color options.  I know some people worry about using poly threads on cotton fabrics.  I have read, and been told, that this is true for your piecing, where the fabric and thread rub together in the seam, but that it’s not an issue for the quilting thread.  I don’t worry about this too much in my own quilts, as I figure they will all outlast me, at the very least.  How do you feel about it?  Are most machine embroidery threads poly?  I know the ones I have are poly.  I’m not going anywhere with this.  Just thought it might be an interesting topic and would love to hear any thoughts you may want to share about thread.  The floor is now open for discussion! 🙂

(BTW, Superior Thread is having a Valentine’s drawing for a $50.00 gift certificate–check it out on Mother Superior’s blog!)

fabric · longarm quilting · quilt top · quilting · quilts · stash busting

Stash Quilting Report, 2-8-09

Wild Rose Quilter7 Comments

I used 2.75 yds adding the borders to my 2nd 9P & stripe quilt.  I had zero yards come in.

  • Incoming Yardage to date: 0 yds.
  • Outgoing Yardage to date:  20.5 yds.
  • Total Stash Busted to date: 20.5 yds.

This will be the next top of my own to go on the longarm.  I have some customer work coming this week, that will go first, however. I think I am seeing some crosshatching & some feather.  Not sure what else.  What do you think?  I even toyed with the idea of just doing a panto on this one, but I think I’ll stick with custom.  I intend to use this quilt in our bedroom, as our fall quilt.000_8157

quilting

Thanks Mom & Dad

Wild Rose Quilter19 Comments

The item Greg & I purchased with our Christmas money finally arrived yesterday.  It’s a linen cupboard I ordered from Plow & Hearth. Finally, someplace to display and store our quilts.  It came in several different colors, and I was really torn between the red & the black options.  We ended up going with the red, as both hallways off of the living room are red.

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embroidery · freehand quilting · longarm quilting · machine quilting · stash busting

Sunday Stash Report, 2-1-09

Wild Rose Quilter5 Comments

I used 1/4 yard up making labels this week, and 1/4 yard making guild name tags for myself and my friend.  So my official “out” for this week is only 1/2 yard.  However, I am plugging away on stash quilts I have going, and soon should have some big numbers to post.

YTD totals:

  • Incoming Yardage to date: 0 yds.
  • Outgoing Yardage to date:  17.75 yds.
  • Total Stash Busted to date: 17.75 yds.

I have border and backing fabric for the 2nd of my 9P & stripe tops, in the dryer as I type.  I pulled this  yummy Robyn Pandolph flannel from my stash, for the backing. My current plan is that this will be the next quilt of my own to land on the longarm.

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I’ve been sewing on my Boston Commons top, during my lunch hours, and have all the end triangles sewn to the 72 strips.  I have started sewing them into the big rows.  I am surprised at how quickly this is actually going together. Please ignore that I haven’t pressed the seams yet.  That is why it looks wonky.  It isn’t really.
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I also got the memorial t-shirt quilt quilted.  Here is a snippet of the freehand quilting on the back.  I will post a pic of the whole quilt after I get it completely finished.
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I have to say that t-shirt quilting is not my most favorite.  I feel like my machine is moving through sludge when I hit the shirt areas, and I had some thread breaking issues. That said, the quilt came out nice, and I know the family will love it.
My friend Betty and I needed name tags to wear to our guild meetings.  I loaded a small “quilt sandwich” on my longarm, quilted it up, and then used my embroidery machine to finish our tags.  They came out cute.  I finished mine out by just stitching a satin stitch edge around, in the lighter green thread, after I took this pic.
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Such a small project, but it still took me almost three hours to do these.  I enjoyed it, though.  And while I had my embroidery machine out, I made labels for two quilts that I made for my Mom, but gave them to her before I had the labels on.  She reminded me recently that I still hadn’t brought the labels to stitch on.  So next time we go to visit, I have some labeling to do!  🙂  One of her labels took 99 minutes to stitch out.  The other was almost an hour.  Embroidery is fun, but it’s not fast.  I love that I can work on other things at the same time, though.  Good job to my hubby for getting me the stand alone machine, rather than the embroidery upgrade for my Aurora.
Tomorrow starts another week at the day job.  I hope y’all have a great week!