the new machine

Here’s my newest toy. As you can see, these are my first ever doodles. Up to now, I’ve been using my little home sewing machine for all my quilting . This should be a lot more fun. I have a very simple quilt almost ready to load on.

The circle quilt.

I have finally completed this quilt and I think it turned out pretty well. I’m going to send it to my son Dave. I hope he likes it.

Block of the Month

I’m making Bernina World of Sewing’s block-of-the-month quilt. Here are the fabrics and pattern for the first block.  
And here is the finished block.

Photo

Mike set these eggs on the kitchen island and I thought they looked nice.

reality check

The holidays are over. Here’s a photo of my desk when I came into work this morning.

Best machine quilting book ever!

I checked out this copy of Diane Gaudynski’s, Guide to Machine Quilting, from the local library (love the library!!) and ended up reading it cover to cover. She just walks you through the whole process in the clearest way possible. There are lots of color photos to illustrate the text and her own workmanship is stunning. If she can achieve those results then I can learn too. I’m inspired!

The Resolutions

1. Do things that help me feel good, like walk, drink lots of water, stretch, etc.
2. Improve my patchwork/quilting skills. This is the year I figure out free-motion machine quilting.
3. Take more pictures.
4. Keep up my journal.

I think four is plenty, but just for the record, I also resolve to go to the beach in 2008.

All Together Now

It was a little tricky at times, but I managed to sew all these blocks together and they are mostly flat. ( We’ll see how true that turns out to be when it’s time to quilt it.) The proportions seem way out of whack to me. It’s too long or not wide enough. I intended to make a square quilt, but I was tired of looking at these blocks so I figured out how many I had to have to make the border pattern work out. That requires an odd number of rows so that the square grid closes at the edge. The result is it is one row longer than it should be. Oh well…

Happy 2008! I’ll post the resolutions later.