Busy Day
Happy Sunday! For some reason our little household was up early this morning. Dennis punched the coffee pot at six, which usually wouldn’t go off until seven.
A breakfast of yogurt and blueberries; I took my breakfast coffee into the studio. I felt like I could get a lot done today. The schematics of the quilting on Luella’s blanket was done yesterday. All that was needed to be done was to turn on the lights and get the Bernina fired up.
My major elf was enlisted to the living room after he had greeted the patio kitties in the porch and had enjoyed his breakfast and coffee in the porch. This would be Dennis’ maiden voyage in putting up our Christmas tree. All I did was put an electric bar close to the activity for easy plugging in and out. I put the suggestion of the tree out there and he ran with it. I came up at noon for more coffee and the tree had been put together and the lights were on. 100% success.
We both agreed it was a tree lacking appeal. It was a tree I had bought in Michael’s several years ago. What had tripped my trigger to purchase it was that it was seven feet of one very skinny tree. The branches do have a bit of frost adorning them. As you can imagine the branches are not very long. Hey . . . we have a tree up and the lights work. I may well be satisfied to enjoy it as is when I sit down fore the evenings in my rocking chair.
Back to my quilting. I have quite a few weights that I use to keep the blanket in place to begin quilting. My sewing table is close enough to the church tables that they carry over as extra area to keep the weight shifted in good proportion while I herd one block at a time under the needle.
Half way through, I needed a new filled bobbin. I check under the needle plate and decided additional thread was not all that was required. Yuck! What a fuzz mess. It was a combination of quilt batting that gets pulled up with each stitch and
fabric fuzz. I got out the can of air to use after I had pulled off as much of the mess with a brush as I could. My hint from the machine dealer was that if canned air was used It was wise to stand facing the front of the machine, not the open bobbin area. The air is sprayed so the lint will blow out of the opened bobbin area. A few drops of oil were also applied. As per the photo, the thread is not exactly free of its own lint. Cleaning the machine often guarantees happy stitching.
I was back to stitching and Dennis came down to the studio and said he would take care of supper. Beggars can’t be choosey. I will take whatever finds its way to the table. Dennis did comment how nice the quilting made the blocks look. As I stitched, I was running through my mind as to what will be used for the binding. I had two inches on either side of the width of the pink and not enough to talk about in the length. Yep, I was cutting it pretty close. There will be plenty of time for deciding that.
The entire quilting process of the 42 blocks was completed today. There were no problems and it went well. I know that after this posting is done, the studio will go dark. As time goes on today, I will begin to feel some stiffness in my neck, shoulders and hands. No surprises. It is part and parcel in projects such as this.
Tomorrow will play out as it will. No pressure.