Unity Quilting

My June UFO is quilted! I spent many hours sitting at the machine this month, shoving the quilt  through the harp of the machine. You know how that goes!

This is the biggest project I have quilted on my DSM in a long time, and it was quite a workout! Because it is a medallion quilt, I got the crazy idea to stitch different designs for each border. I should've just stitched a simple, straight grid. But it's just like me to make it as challenging as possible!  And I do really like the effect - can you see the quilting designs on the back? 

I used my heavy duty gardening gloves from Canadian Tire for this job because they really grip better than any gloves made for quilting. But they are hot to wear, which is great in the winter and not pleasant on hot June days! 

Of course I enjoyed using all the thread colours! I stitched 3 wavy lines in the side borders to give a ribbon effect, and used these 3 colours. You can't tell when looking at it because all the colours blend with the fabric, but it makes me happy using lots of thread colours.  

I have already prepared and attached the binding, and can now enjoy the relaxing process of hand stitching it to the back of the quilt. I have one week left before the end of June and I'm so pleased that this quilt will be finished by then!

Linking up to Finished (or Not) over at Alycia's

June UFO Update

The quilting process is moving along well on my Unity quilt. This is the border most recently quilted. I found a way to stitch long, continuous lines of quilting with only a couple of stops/starts at the corners.

Now I am quilting the word 'patience' with lots of stops and starts, and I made a little video to show how I sew in the thread ends at the beginning and end of each line of stitching.

Minimizing the stops/starts is important because the process of hand stitching the thread ends takes quite a bit of time. I'd rather be doing other fun hand stitching, so I try to minimize the threads ends by finding long quilting paths. The last few borders will go faster (I hope) and I'll be able to finish this quilt by the end of the month.

April, May and June UFO

This Unity quilt is taking me soooo long to finish. I'm now starting the 3rd month with this as my UFO focus quilt. It's so funny that I thought I could finish this quilt in April! Perhaps I struggle a bit with having "unrealistic expectations" of myself! LOL

Progress continues to be made but it's a big quilt and each border needs a different quilting pattern, with different colours of thread. This border is being quilted with curved lines/arcs, which is generally my "go to" favourite design.

For the word 'courage' I quilted a wavy line in each letter using green thread. Then using white thread I quilted approximately 1/4" away from the edge of each line. Those lines are wobbly so we'll call that "organic" quilting - meaning free form, natural looking, ruler-free and spontaneous (and visually disturbing to some eyes).

This is how far it is quilted by the end of May. There is still 1 word and 5 more borders to quilt, plus the binding. So that's my goal for June - linking up to One Monthly Goal (again).

December UFO

pin basting the layers

I didn't do anything with my December UFO prior to Christmas, but during the past week I buckled down to it. My brain needed to be in a relaxed state where I could focus and make decisions. 

I was quite hesitant to start the quilting but once I started it went very quickly. 

The little stars were outline stitched with an X through the middle.

The bigger red stars was outlined stitched also, and I used the hera marker for the lines through the centre.

The background was quilted with random swirls and loops.

I decorated the tree with red thread and made clam shell shapes to look like garland. I don't it ended up looking like garland, but that's okay :)

This quilt was made from a beautiful kit I purchased in 2017 from Quilter's Nine Patch (which unfortunately closed due to covid, but still has a small online store). The pattern is in Kim Diehl's wonderful book called Simple Christmas Tidings. 

This is my last finished quilt for 2021 and I'm so excited to finish it before midnight! 

Linking up to One Monthly Goal.

Happy New Year!

November UFO Update

While pin basting, I enjoy conversation with the quilt about the possible options for quilting designs. I usually come up with several ideas and run my fingers over the blocks to find possible paths for continuous lines of stitching. For this month's UFO I kept coming back to the same idea - wavy lines.

I have often been inspired by the serpentine wavy quilting that Preeti (So Preeti Quilts) uses and decided to give that a try. My sewing machine only does a straight stitch, so all the waves would have to be made by me. 

I always start quilting in the middle of the quilt and stitch to the edge, and that's what I did again only this time I made the stitch line wavy. I love visiting each block as I stitch on by. I'm making great wavy progress and am on target for finishing this UFO in November!

October UFO is Finished!

I am so happy to have finished my Bats and Boos mystery quilt! This is a free pattern from the Fat Quarter Shop and is the perfect table topper for Halloween! I didn't add the outside border as it was already large enough for my table.

I posted about quilting the centre block here.

In the pumpkins I quilted curvy lines, and then made wavy lines around them, which look a bit like tendrils in the pumpkin patch.

I quilted curvy lines inside the bat, but because it's black thread on black fabric, you can't really see that quilting.

This is my favourite block - the cat bat! The wavy lines around the bats look like they are in flight and pushing the air forward around them.

The binding is made from 4 leftover strips of black fabric that were used in making the quilt.

Finished size: 32.5" x 32.5"

I'm so happy with this quilt and offer my thanks to the Fat Quarter Shop for this fun mystery adventure!

Linking up to One Monthly Goal

August UFO

Grassy Creek quilt top

I finally decided (way past the deadline to sign up for One Monthly Goal) that in August I would finish my 2020 Quiltville mystery called Grassy Creek. I had been fussing around since the end of January trying to decide about the border, and impulsively decided I'd had enough of the indecisiveness and declared the quilt top was finished! 

I made 12 blocks for my version (instead of 25) and each of my blocks has a different green, orange, red and gold. I decided to just quilt curves and change colours for each block. I started quilting the green curves and did all 12 green patches first, then orange, then grey, then gold. It was a lot of stop and starts, but it was fun and that's how I like to do my quilting :)

I did not string piece my sashing blocks, so my sashings are a plain piece of grey. 

They seemed a bit puffy with the initial curve quilting, so I added a line of loops through the centre of the sashing to smash them down a bit. Much better.

Machine Quilting

On Monday I posted a photo of my quilt top for the Sister's Scrap Challenge. It has a lot of small pieces in it and I thought it needed to be heavily quilted to keep it flat.

I decided to quilt wavy lines on the diagonal with occasional loops, and circles around these fussy cut firework looking scraps. It's a fun quilting idea and I am enjoying the process.

No matter how hard you try to space the scraps, it is inevitable that there will be 2 of the exact same scraps ending up side by side. See the silver on white pieces... right close to each other.  I remind myself that "random" does not mean "equally spaced", but seriously why didn't I notice that when I was sewing the quilt top together?!?!

This is one of my favourite blocks in the quilt - a cute little ohio star. I quilted a little loop in the centre of the star. And the selvage edge beside the star says "Fabricville"... love it!

It has been fun to machine quilt this scrap collection. There are so many cute little pieces, such as the cat face on the red square - can you see her?

I better get quilting - this quilt has to be finished by the end of tomorrow to submit the photo before the deadline. I'm cutting it close!

Linking up to Free Motion Mavericks

October Mini Finish

Most of my October accomplishments occurred  because I cleaned the quilting room at the beginning of the month. New windows were installed, so space had to be made for the workers to walk through. It's amazing the treasures that were (re) discovered!

I found two 3" finished blocks and lots of strips and couldn't wait to sit down and sew more blocks. Sewing the blocks together was the challenging part and lots of pins were required. 

If you haven't made anything yet with 1" strips, this is what it looks like from the back. It's all seam allowances, which I press open to try to get it to lay flatter.

While I was sewing the 9 blocks together, I decided to turn it into a pillow. I made the Peace  block to go on the other side of the pillow, and bordered both blocks with the same batik fabric.

I machine quilted both blocks with just a piece of batting underneath. I quilted random leaves around the Peace block. This is how it looks from the back.

There are 225 1" squares in the mini quilt which finish at .5". I was really proud of that piecing, and think that the large print border and feather quilting takes attention away from the centre piecing. That's okay... I still love my finished pillow!

This is where my new pillow lives - in my reading corner with the library book I am enjoying and the beautiful shawl my friend Louise made for me. 

Hop over to The Constant Quilter to see the other mini quilt projects made this month.

Machine Quilting

This month's UFO is a mystery quilt that I made in an in person class (remember the good old days?!?) almost 2 years ago. It really isn't my usual kind of quilt to make, with all the fabrics matching and looking so beautiful! LOL

It takes a lot of thought and preparation to work on a UFO. These are some of the tasks: look for where you carefully stored (hid) the quilt top, find lots of other projects you want to finish up, refocus on the UFO, measure the quilt top, cut a piece of batting to the needed size, gather some yardage to piece a backing, press top and backing, select threads, wind bobbins, pin baste the quilt, and then finally, you're ready to quilt.

I tried a new quilting design this month and I'm excited about how it is turning out. 

I was inspired by a design posted by Melissa who blogs at Happy Quilting when I first saw it more than 2 years ago. She calls the design "loose feathers".

Instead of making the feathers go both directions, I tried to have all the feathers going the same way. It was a good challenge for my brain to quilt one row of feathers from top to bottom, and the next row from bottom to top. But I don't think it was worth the effort and next time, I'll probably stitch the feathers in all directions like Melissa does, since it looks just as nice and is much easier to quilt.

One more week before the end of the month to finish the quilting, get the binding prepped, attached, and hand stitched.

How are your UFO efforts coming along this fall?

Machine Quilting Preparations

When I teach machine quilting, I always stress the importance of preparing and thinking through all the choices before you start:

I 💖 this machine!

1) machine - I only quilt with my 25+ year old Brother 1500.  It has been a work horse for all these years and it can reportedly stitch 1500 stitches per minute. I don't know about that as I would never sew that fast, but it sure does a great job! (no affiliation to any of the companies listed here, just a really happy customer of these products)
2) thread - for me, it's always Aurifil 50 weight. My machine loves this thread and I never have tension issues to deal with, so I buy it by the cone (6452 yards/5900 metres).
3) needle - I have the best success with the topstitch 90 needle for machine quilting. I do not have any skipped stitches (when I'm using the Warm and Natural batting which I purchase by the roll).

Oil, quilting foot, needles and bobbins

4) oil - add lots of oil before quilting so the thousands of mechanical movements can be smooth and slick.
5) bobbins - I usually wind up 3 bobbins full of thread to start quilting a project.
6) quilting foot - I chose the open toe embroidery foot for the free motion quilting on this project. The thing I dislike about it is that it gets caught on every pin, but I like being able to fully see when I am quilting loops. I will try to be very careful when I rearrange the quilt as I go along to avoid snagging the pins.

orange duck watching the looping stitches

I decided to start by quilting loops on the sashings. I enjoyed visiting the scrappy blocks as I quilted on by. The goal was to make all the loops go in the same direction, but I couldn't seem to remember that, and they ended up going every which way. 

***The invitation of machine quilting is... to suspend your perfectionistic tendencies and ENJOY the process wherever it leads and however it looks! It helps me to remind myself that I am not trying to create a masterpiece, I'm just trying to finish a quilt!

In this block the deer is running away, the fox is sound asleep, and the rabbit is supervising the quilting!

Machine Quilting

Progress is being made on machine quilting the Twist comfort quilt. It has been a bright and cheery project to work on this month. 

The quilting started with my standard stitch in the ditch grid with the walking foot. I decided not to quilt the diagonal lines of the design which would go right through the adorable centre blocks.
After all the straight lines were quilted, the fun part started! I changed to the free motion foot and started quilting arcs in the HST blocks. Aren't the fussy cut centres just so sweet?

Then I quilted  more arcs in the empty yellow squares. I just eyeball the arc path, trying to sew a smooth curve from corner to corner. No marking. No rulers. Lots of wobbles and whoopsies. I'm fine with that. 
It's "good enough"!

Mid Month UFO Report

One of the casualties of the coronavirus measures is NO St. Patrick's Day parties this year. I will miss the celebrations this year as I have always enjoyed that mid March festivity. Wishing you all a very Happy St. Patrick's Day! 

Instead of celebrating, I'll be in my quilting room working on my March UFO. This month I am hoping to finish my asterisks quilt. It has been waiting for 2 years to be finished and this is the month!
I picked a red-salmon colour thread for the bobbin and a variegated green for the top. The fabric under the red thread is the backing.

I am quilting vertical lines with some random loops which is a quilting design that I saw on Cathy's Sane, Crazy, Crumby quilting blog. It's a fun design to quilt and it's going quickly, so that's a win-win!

How are you spending St. Patrick's Day?!?

Machine Quilting Class Coming Soon!

feather quilting sample

In spite of my recent complaining about quilting my UFO project, I usually love machine quilting. I have taken many classes, and taught many classes on this topic over the years. There is so much to learn, and everyone has their own tips and tricks to make it enjoyable and successful.
And there are so many fun designs to experiment with!

ribbon candy and wishbones sample

I am teaching a machine quilting class at Triangle Sewing on Saturday January 25th, so join us if you want to learn 4 free motion quilting designs - feathers, ribbons, wishbones and swirls. 


I often hear things like "it's too hard", or "I'm not good at free motion quilting". But it only gets easier, and you become good at it, by PRACTICING. It's the only way to learn this skill.

swirls in small spaces sample

Part of the challenge with machine quilting is learning about teamwork. You and your machine are a team. With practice you learn to respect your sewing machine, discover what it is good at, what thread it prefers, and how to work together for the best outcome.
Click here for the Triangle Sewing contact info and join me for a fun day of practicing and improving your machine quilting skills!

Machine Quilting Class

I haven't done much teaching lately and had a desire to teach a machine quilting class. So I arranged to teach a Saturday class at Triangle Sewing on December 7th. 

feather quilting

In addition to covering the topics of basting and tools I use, the class will focus on how to quilt 3 of my favourite designs - feathers, ribbons, and swirls. 
It is a "hard sell" to convince some quilters that (after lots of practice hours) it is possible to experience great joy and find the whole machine quilting process to be very relaxing. 
But it's totally true for me! 

I finished up some small samples to hang at the store to show the designs, and this one is my favourites. I love stitching feathers both as a "fill in the space" design on small pieces, and as a border design on larger quilts. 

I really enjoy taking a piece of fabric that I have painted, then quilt it, and then add more paint or beads or text, or whatever it calls out for. It's definitely a work in progress.
I'm not sure if it should hang horizontally or vertically?

If you are interested in taking the class with me in December, you can find more details at the Triangle Sewing website.
Happy Quilting!