Friday 11 April 2014

Slow progress

Things didn't go quite as planned with the quilting I mentioned last post. Quite aside from disappearing to bed with a cold for a few days, the thickness of 2 layers of flannel and the thicker batting posed some problems, mostly some breakage of the top thread. I solved that with the settings below (more for my reference than anything else!).


However, my greater problem was the small bumps where the seam allowances were folded back. when working with flannel, I always press them open to minimise this, and my design didn't have all that many seams meeting in one place, but it was enough with the extra thickness in general. My solution was a little unorthodox, but worked. I turned the quilt upside down and quilted from the back! Of course, this will only work for an allover pattern, but I used the meandering open feathers, so that was ok. I don't have any puckers or bunched-up areas, and I'll see how flat it lies, and how straight the seams are later, but at first glance, I'm happy.


I've set it aside for a few days while I work on another quilt. I started by tracing the pattern on a disc. Yes, the lightbox did make a difference, even through a disc! Now I'm working with this selection of Vicki Welsh's beautiful hand dyed gradients, and a white-on-white snowflake print:


One last thing. If you read my blog in a reader, rather than on the blog, you'll have noticed I've reduced what goes into the reader to just the beginning of the post. I'm sorry to have to do this, but unfortunately I had experience this week, along with many other quilting bloggers, of having my content (complete posts, including my photos) stolen (most likely through a feeder) and posted elsewhere, with neither permission nor links to the original. While a joint effort has closed this particular site down, I'm now taking precautionary measures - which also explains the text below, which will now appear (hopefully fairly unobtrusively) below all future posts.

The post "Slow progress" was posted on www.sampaguitaquilts.blogspot.com on 11/4/14.

2 comments:

Mary said...

Would you consider changing the background of the blog to something other than black? That was the reason I read it in a reader. Its easier my "older" eyes.

Barbara @ Fir Tree Quilting said...

As the above comment, I find the light text against a black background hard to read.