January 2020

It has been an icy, snowy, rainy weekend.  This is the first time in over 15 years that my little quilt club had to cancel due to the weather.  We were to bring our mystery anniversary quilts with us.  I was very sick for a couple of months last year and got way behind on mine.  I ended up just putting random blocks into my quilt to to get it finished. 
I am not crazy about it.  We each chose a crayon out of a paper bag and that was to be our dominant color.  Then we were told to make certain size blocks, clover leaf blocks, Christmas blocks, the flower block, etc.  I should have stuck with one shade of green I think, and not introduced the red.  It was a mystery, so I got what I got.

 I played around with free motion quilting.  I had to remove another quilt I was working on and remove all the quilting I had already done on it because my tension was all out of whack.  This quilt was for me, so I didn't care as much about the tension issues.  Til the end of this quilt I pretty much got that straightened out.  It ended up being a bad bobbin. 

 This is the quilt that I initially had on the frame and had to remove all the quilting on.  I made this quilt right after my mother died.  It was so very therapeutic for me.  I still had a few issues with tension.  My major problem was my stitch length regulator.  I saw where someone posted pictures of their stitching with the same machine I had.  Their stitches were perfect.  Mine were never perfect.  I thought I would try to tweak the SLR.  What I ended up doing was to make the stitches worse.  I worked on the SLR for hours upon hours.  I even had my mechanical husband help me.  It is to the point that I can quilt with it, but with the irregular stitches I had a lot of thread breakage.  I wish I didn't need the SLR, but I do.  I think I am going to be in the market for a new quilting system this Spring.  I hope I can find a good one used.

This quilt is Antique Lace that I made for my mother's sister.  I want to get this in the mail to her asap.

 One good result of the wintry weather weekend is that my grandson got to spend the entire weekend with me.  His family was in Disney two weeks ago, then they all came home sick, so this is the first I got to see any of them for two weeks!  I was going through withdrawal.  We watched movies, played a Star Wars card game and Bey Blades.  Elijah is such a fun kid to have around.