Last week I finally tried out the computerized stitching on the Gammill longarm at Jukebox Quilts in Fort Collins, CO. It was definitely a trip watching the machine stitch the pattern out for me. I still had to baste it myself and stood watch to make sure that the threads didn't break or the bobbin run out.
The quilt flimsy was one that I first pieced at the beginning of this blog in March 2006 - here. A few years later I finally got around to getting it ready to hand quilt. The design was going to be circles of various sizes but I didn't like what it was looking like so it was abandoned yet again.
When I took it out of the project box I noticed for the first time how horrible the borders were. When I sewed them on, I knew that I was supposed to measure, cut and then sew but thought that it wouldn't be that big of a deal to cut after I sewed them on. Au contraire mon ami, when I ripped them out I discovered that the short sides had an additional 6" of length for the borders. And the long sides were too short by 6"! Ye gads! That's what happens when you don't measure first. (I finally found the photo of it on my flickr photostream .. here ... isn't that border wavy?!) If I had left them that way it would have been lots of tucks at the longarm. Instead I took a fairly flat flimsy and it quilted up without any problems.
Once again I pieced the backing and had no problems. We did keep the fabric tension looser because of all the batiks but I think that it ended up being too loose because the back-tracking didn't line up properly in some places. But it was amazing how a much more complicated design was able to be stitched in the same amount of time that I hand-guided simpler designs on slightly larger quilts.
Now I just have to do the binding. I'm thinking of making a binding with the dark red/orange and a light orange piping for a bit of pop. Then a hanging sleeve and it'll finally be ready to hang up on the wall after all these years.
The piecing is from Karla Alexander's Stack a New Deck, quilting design is Natalia Major's Waterdrops Simple. Quilted on a Gammill Statler Stitcher with Signature thread in Stone Blue. 80/20 batting.
40" x 65" wall hanging size.
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