Jelly Roll Quilt - Finished!

Hello 

I got my jelly roll quilt finished.

its gone from this....

to this.........

It took a while, but I made all the petals and leaves separately and sewed them down whilst the quilt was still on the frame.
I stitched the Suffolk puffs down by hand.

 I'm pretty pleased with my quilting here.  It was a challenge to get the feathers to snake around the center section and get them to fit into the space. I've not done that before. I had to roll the quilt back and forth - a lot.

I will be entering this into my local show later in the year.  I always wanted to make a blue and white quilt and now I have.

I've been very busy working on a charity quilt recently.  Here's a wee sneaky peek to finish this post.

More next time......

Until then, happy sewing.

Rhianon.

Sapphire Stars Quilt - more quilting.

Since I last posted I feel as if I have achieved little but looking at these photos I realise I have actually done quite a lot.   This quilt has been very slow going and has had me pulling my hair out at times.

When you last saw it, I had worked the borders and was pretty happy with them.

 I completely changed my plan of how I was going to quilt this.

This was my original doodle but instead I used two dinner plates to draw around for the circles but because of my tiny machine I had to do everything in small sections.

 So far, so good.........

 This is the center of one of the nine patch blocks.

 Halfway through, for some reason, my quilt started to sag in the middle and I couldn't get a good tension on it.  I unpinned the quilt top from the bottom bar 3 times to try and fix it.  I have no idea why this happened and can only put it down to my (inaccurate (didn't think I was that bad lol ) piecing).
This frame quilting malarkey is certainly a steep learning curve but I was disappointed and annoyed at myself.  Halfway through I just wanted to give up but decided to keep going.

 Very messy - but  have unpicked this, fixed it and it looks better now.

I am almost at the bottom border and all going well it should be off the frame sometime this weekend..
The frustrating thing about frame quilting ( apart from not having a long arm) is you have to wait until the end to see the whole thing as its all wound up on the bar. Despite all the problems with this quilt I am still enjoying my journey so far.
Already thinking about 'what's next?'
Enjoy your weekend and thanks for stopping by.
Rhianon.

A Practice Quilt - on the Frame

Hi everyone.
This week I finally got to play on my frame.  This is a top I pieced ages ago using Suzanne McNeill's 10 minute block.

As I am still a novice on the frame, I used a 4oz poly wadding, don't want to use up all my good Hobbs.  I'm still getting used to the feel of the machine and actually think my frame needs to be raised a bit.  My back was aching after a while and I felt I was stooping to see what I was doing.

 I found these clam shells quite easy to do and think they look ok.  I don't have a stitch regulator  and I really want one as I think it would definitely help with control.  Sometimes you need to sew fast and sometimes not so fast.  At the moment it is just start and stop - I find it very distracting having to take my eyes off the sewing to turn the dial to speed up or slow down.  This is resulting in some wonky stitches. Not good.

 So this is my very first quilt worked on my frame.  Already I have learned a lot.  Like the importance of stitch ditching - something I didn't really bother with when quilting on the table top.  I need to get a ruler - my next question is : will the base of my machine be wide enough to rest the ruler on ?   I know longarm machines have a plate attachment available but I can't find anything for my Janome 1600p.
The ruler is not that expensive so I think I will go ahead and try anyway..

                                   A bit of messy thread build up in the spine of these feathers.

                                                          These ones are a bit neater.

                    You can see the need to stitch in the ditch to define the squares in this photo.

                                                                         Back.

 Another problem I encountered was not leaving enough backing to give the machine room to quilt right up to the edges.  Lesson learned. Some side leaders would have solved that problem.

Just adding the binding to this now and looking forward to my next quilt.  Today I am quilting my hummingbird wall hanging - so it should be a good day!
Enjoy your weekend!
Rhianon :)