Monday, April 14, 2014

Celebrating Spring!

We enjoyed a wonderful sewing session on Friday at The Sunshine Club in Alton, New Hampshire. It was especially fun to welcome a new member, Mary, who brought a big happy bunch of potholders to work on.


She says she needs 40 done by Christmas, so she's starting early. Way to go, Mary!

Pauline almost has all her collected blocks for the North Barnstead Community Church sampler quilt. One of her friends had made lots of birdhouse blocks for it. They looked so colorful! The block that Pauline is holding up is a spring basket with an embellished ribbon bow attached to it. Nice!


You can see Sue, there, too and she's still working on her purple tumblers. Margorie is crocheting up her baby blanket and managed to wear a coordinating blouse to match!


As for me, I was celebrating Spring by bringing in my Scotland-made Featherweight, "Scottie." It has not been since November that I have machine sewed at The Sunshine Club, as it became too difficult to haul Scottie in and out of the car between the snow drifts and iced in parking lots.


Another small celebration of Spring came when I asked Husband Wonderful, Felix, to please change the blade on my big rotary cutter. Wheeeeeee! Now it glides rather than drags. I keep a small sticker on the back of my blade holder to record the date we changed it last. I usually get 2 or 3 months out of a blade.


As for Palm Sunday, not being very churchy myself, I went to Ellen Peters' Cat's Whiskers Quilting Studio.

I had another full sized 5" tumblers top to be quilted. I had thought that it was going to be too short, so I added two more rows to it. But I must've mis-measured something.


The quilt top was too long for both the backing and the batting! Holy Carp!
But my good teacher, Ellen, did not panic like I did. We scooted in an extra length of batting and we used a seam ripper to remove one row of the tumblers and then everything came out fine!


The quilting took me about two hours. I outlined each tumbler by doing a sort of a "W" pattern across the quilt. You go down, across the bottom of the tumbler and then up the other side and then across the top of the next tumbler. When you do the next row, the order reverses to catch the bottoms that get skipped in the second tumbler in from the row above. It sounds complicated in words but it's really easy when you see it. You just need to pay attention, LOL!
I told Ellen that I might name the quilt, "Rescue Me" because it has so many mistakes in it, LOL!
When things go awry, persevere and it will all be okay in the end.

Happy quilting!

6 comments:

Janet O. said...

Mary looks like a sweetheart. I love her foresight in planning ahead!
Those birdhouse blocks look very fun!
Nice looking tumbler quilt. I want to make another big one someday. Made one years ago that was gifted. Have only made tiny ones since then.

June said...

I love your tumbler quilt! Scrappy quilts scare me to death, though. Maybe someday I get up the nerve to start one. You are so lucky to belong to such a wonderful group of ladies!!

Helen in the UK said...

Glad you managed to 'save' the quilt by adding some batting and removing some tumblers :)

Feathers in my Nest said...

Beautiful quilt Vic, and your sewing machine is a very handsome "Scotty"..

Elaine Adair said...

Your posts are always full of laughing and enjoying your friends - that is how I think of you.

Good tip about the date when a new blade goes in your rotary cutter.

Michele said...

What a wonderful simple idea to put a label on the rotary cutter!! Thank you for the tip.

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