Post-Christmas productivity

Christmas has come and gone and I managed to meet all my sewing deadlines on time.  The green and white quilt I featured in November was given to my sister-in-law who had been dropping not-so-subtle hints for some time that she wanted one!

Her husband has been hard at work finishing their basement into a media room with wet bar, home office, gas fireplace and powder room, with lots of green tones, so this was perfect for them.  For my other sister-in-law I whipped up a set of placemats with this easy pattern from Sew Biz called "Set the Table, Mabel!"

And then for my 11-year-old stepdaughter, I bought her a bunk bed set for her two American Girl dolls and made some bedding to match what she likes and has at our house.

I note also that the doll on the top is wearing a pajama set I made her last Christmas (with a matching set for my stepdaughter, each of whom have their first initial appliqued to the white t-shirt in flannel).

As usual, my well-trained family gave me a nice variety of quilter gifts - fat quarters, a half dozen charm packs, a jelly roll, two Accuquilt dies, and Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting Designs book (in print).

Now my husband is off to see his daughters for the weekend (although we just said goodbye to them all Wednesday) and I'm going to have to go through my sewing room, cleaning up from hurriedly-made gifts, putting my gifts away, and deciding what to make with my new goodies.

I do wish my sewing room had better lighting.  It's fine during a sunny day, but there are no ceiling lights and floor lamps only go so far.  We have not yet made progress on finding a new house, but, happily, our old one is under contract, through inspections, and scheduled to go to settlement in mid-January.  So I suppose the next part of getting settled here in Raleigh can move more quickly.  I'd love to find a job soon too, but so far no movement on that front, either with temp agencies or applications.  Frustrating.  More sewing time, I guess.

On the plus side of staying in and nesting, TCM's Star of the Month is my favorite classic film star, Joan Crawford.  Sadly, my DVR only holds three movies before it's full, so today I had to set my alarm for 6 AM to start watching before it tried to record a fourth at 7:15.  Of course, I'll have to make sure there is sufficient room for the start of Season 4 of Downton Abbey beginning Sunday night!

Jacob's Ladder - first finishing point

Tomorrow is the deadline for the Quilting is Murder UFO challenge, and I have worked on nothing else since learning of it early last month.  Well, nothing else in my sewing room - of course there was plenty to distract me, like the kind of work I get paid for doing 40+ hours/week, working out, cleaning the house, and so on.  But my spare time all went into this quilt.

Remember, I started with a box full of blocks and a quilting stencil that I had put away in 2001:

And then I decided on a double sawtooth border using some thangles:

Finally I got the top put together and basted last weekend, and tried a new marking technique with a pouncing spray:

Now the deadline arrives and my goal was to have the bulk of the quilting done on the center of the top.  I have quilted all the center blocks with the sheaf of wheat template, and the ladder sections to look like ladders.  There are some open squares still that I'm thinking about another stencil in, and I have the edge sections and borders still to do (no idea what to do in the 4.5" wide white border!) but it is finished to the point that it is being submitted to the judges for the challenge today on the Flickr group. 

First, the "completed" top:

And I have to choose one of these detail photos to submit:

It feels really strange to submit a quilt for "judging" with pins still in the borders and markings still all over the fabric.  This is not a quilt I'd ever be submitting for real judging.  The seam quality on the swap blocks made it very challenging to put them together well, and my machine quilting definitely shows signs of improvement from rocky beginning to smoother finish.  I'm not going to ask for any votes, and am not even posting this to my Facebook page, because I really only want people interested in the contest itself to participate in the voting.  I like the way they've organized it with the shop owners getting 100 votes each to balance out the ballot-box-stuffing that happens.  I trust that the judges know what they're doing with the rules they created for this challenge!

Still, I didn't participate in this to win (yet) another sewing machine.  I wanted to get this UFO finished, and I wanted some practice at building my machine-quilting skills, and I wanted to try out some new-to-me techniques, and I've accomplished all that (or am on my way to doing so).  I plan to continue with this past tomorrow's deadline to get it DONE done before I turn to working on any of my other projects. So regardless of how the contest turns out, I consider myself a winner.  ;-)

Jacob's Ladder Progress

Thanks all for your comments about guild guilt - as I commented on the post myself, I ended up agreeing to do the newsletter.  I see now that it includes publicity, which I will probably reinterpret in my own way, delegate, or else drop the ball on entirely.  Well, this is what they get with a technologically inclined, busy woman!  Print media?  What's print media??  Incidentally, if anyone uses a freeware/shareware desktop publishing program they love, please feel free to share in the comments.

Guild ended early last night and I had some time to sew.  I've tried several new (to me) techniques on this UFO.  Over the weekend I finished with my double sawtooth border (made with Thangles; new technique #1) and got the quilt pin basted.

Last night I finished running some straight lines in the ditch over the quilt using my walking foot, which I've never attempted before (new technique #2).

My third new technique is something I came across at JoAnn's while shopping for batting and backing fabric for this quilt.  I was browsing the quilt stencils area for something to do in that 4.5" wide white border area and came across a stencil marking spray.  I'd never used it before but thought it was worth a try, since pounces make a mess and don't leave enough of a mark on the quilt, and I can never use marking pens or pencils on stencils reliably.

The instructions said to cover the area around the quilt to protect from overspray, so I took the lid of a copy paper box, cut a hole in it slightly smaller than the stencil, and taped the stencil into it.

Surprisingly to me, this does not spray a blue line similar to the marking pen, but a chalky substance similar to a pounce.  It works pretty effectively.  I used it on a scrap piece and rinsed it all out much more easily than the water-soluble pen.  It leaves a little chalky dust on my free-motion quilting foot that I blow off after I take the quilt out to mark the next square, but it works very well.

The only challenge is placing it correctly on the square to quilt since you have to cover up so much around it.  I think I have a system down for peering through it enough to get it right but it's a little tricky.  I'll also have to wipe off the excess spray from the stencil before I use it again tonight - the photo above is after four uses.

Additionally, when I pin-basted this top, I did NOT use any basting spray since I'd been reading that it might have been the culprit behind a lot of my tension and broken thread issues on the Hoopla baby quilts last year.  Sure enough, I have not had any issues so far.  I also have to say that the time I've spent reading Leah Day's and Judi Madsen's blogs, between their machine quilting and top marking tips, have really been helpful to me in undertaking this project.  I might end up machine quilting myself more after this!

I'm happy with the way this is quilting and I hope that I can get a lot done before this weekend's challenge "completion" deadline.  I know it doesn't have to be finished, bound and laundered but I'd at least like to finish the quilting in the center of the quilt.