Sunday, March 21, 2010

National Quilting Day Stuff

Lots of things were worked on yesterday. I spent most of the day taming the hoard, by folding fabric. Ok.. at this point, I MUST agree that folding fabric using your ruler really does take up less space. I chose to use my 24x8.5 inch ruler because it fits my Rubbermaid bins as well as the storage cabinet where I just put all the Halloween fabric. Fabric Folding Tutorial

Yesterday, March 20, was National Quilting Day. One of the challenges on my board was to clean up and organize the thread box! Mine is always a mess because I have too much thread. I haven't yet used down the thread that I bought when a quilt shop went out of business, but I'm getting there! I have all different sizes, but mostly all cotton. I have a handful of Coats and Clark and some specialty threads such as silk.
Thread Mess
Here's the thread all organized. It all fit in and the cover closes, but not completely. In the glass bowl (a former candy dish), I keep thread and incidentals for the current project(s). In the larger round container, I have thread used for hand projects such as silk and hand quilting cotton, plus a few metallics. About once a year, I get all the partial spools together and use them up in a scrap quilt top.
Thread Organized
Progress on the Waterfall Quilt. Here's what it is looking like a few days ago. It's about 1/2 quilted.
Waterfall Quilt prorgress
Close up of quilting. As you can see, I did echo quilting around the diamonds. The dark green areas are done with a wave meander (sharp instead of smooth meander), the green is done with a regular meander and the yellow is bubbles. I put off quilting this quilt for ages because I couldn't decide how to quilt it. Then I was going to do leaves, but find I just don't have the skill to put leaves in these narrow sections. I like the bubbles though. Cool. I give credit for the method to Leah Day, who gave me tips. See her Free Motion Quilting videos!
Waterfall Closeup

Tonight, I'm recording both Pacific (HBO) and two episodes of Life (Discovery), so I'll be knitting on my short fur cuffed socks. I've completed the red part on one sock and just started the gusset on the other. I hope to get the red section done tonight. Once I get this pair done, I'll be working on my UFO socks.

1 comment:

Molly said...

I love your threads, I could just run my hands through them and enjoy the colors. I also love the design of your quilt, it is quite stunning. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. Take care.