Machine Quilting Again

I've begun machine quilting again, and Baby Groot is running much quieter after his tune-up. I tried to continue on the quilt that I stopped quilting in March, but after about 4 1/2 hours, I ran out of thread! I didn't have any thread that was a good match, so I put that one away unfinished (again!). Rather than stop quilting, I switched to another project and have finished quilting two other quilts in the time it took for a new thread cone to arrive (about a week).

In the midst of all this work on unfinished projects I have been contemplating why I don't finish some projects. I finish a lot of quilts, but over a couple of decades, the unfinished ones can add up. Here is the breakdown:

1) I wasn't sure how I want to quilt it. So rather than going through books and Pinterest until I could settle on a quilting design, I folded it up and moved on to a different project.

2) I had a technical problem that I didn't feel like fixing just then. Triangles that got distorted and lost their points, pieced borders that don't fit, plain borders that ripple, a machine quilting pattern that I decided I didn't like, etc. It wasn't that I don't know how to fix it--at this point I know how to fix most quilty problems--I just didn't want to fix it.

3) I didn't like the way the design was working. Design issues can be difficult to troubleshoot, and even if you know what is wrong you have to weigh the effort of the solution. An example is a set of Dresden plate blocks that I made with a light gray solid background (all those modern quilters with their stylish grays influenced me). I put them up on the design wall with some other Dresden plate blocks that I'd intended to mix them with. And I didn't like the way they mixed. The gray made the blocks positively dreary. So I pulled out all the gray ones. I made a nice quilt with the other blocks, and now I am left with 19 (why such a weird number, I do not recall) dull Dresdens. I hand appliqued these blocks. I do not want to rip them off their backgrounds. I want to find a way to make them work with the gray.

So here are some (sightly out of focus) experiments at my sit and stitch group of how to salvage the Dresdens:



So far I am leaning towards adding black sashing. Maybe.

Baby Groot takes a holiday

I have been continuing my UFO (unfinished object) challenge. This 1/4-log cabin quilt was made from a set of blocks I sewed in an effort to reduce the amount of scraps in my collection. There have been a few other quilts in different settings from this set of blocks but this is the last.



This scrap quilt was designed to use up the smallest of my scraps, leftovers 2 inches or smaller. I sorted the scraps by color and sewed them into blocks. I had a hard time deciding how to quilt this one, so it spent some time as a UFO.



I also finished a Quilt of Valor this spring. It had wavy borders and I didn't feel like fixing them, so I put it away for several years. It is now quilted and ready to go.



After finishing the quilting on these quilts, I started a third one when I started to notice my machine beginning to growl. I checked the stitch count (yes, my machine counts how many stitches it has made) and I am at about 2.3 million. According to the internet, after about 2 million it should be serviced. Baby Groot (as I named my industrial quilting machine) needs to be lubricated, so he took a holiday until I could get him to the shop. I checked my records, and Baby Groot has quilted 32 quilts since 2015. Wow. In the meantime, I quilted and finished a couple of small wall-hanging quilts that could be quilted on the Megasaurus (my other quilting machine, which is smaller and not so industrial).



I also did some hand applique and I have been making progress on some of my UFOs that are still in the piecing stage and not ready for quilting. I have already worked on unfinished projects that I didn’t think I would get to this year; so far I have completed 7 UFOs.