Fresh Off the Longarm

Believe it or not, I actually engaged myself in a pleasurable couple of days of longarm quilting. Yes. After many weeks of procrastinating making a backing for a quilt measuring 96" x 112", I finally overcame my aversion to "mathing out" the best way to accomplish it. Gah, quilt math!!! How I dislike this part of the quilting process.

Back in 2009-10, I was a brand new retiree concentrating on UFOs before starting something new. My first brand new start in retirement life was this quilt. It's a pattern by Thimbleberries; I will seek out the book and pattern to include in my next post. 

Just look at how big this quilt is on my queen-size bed. Absolutely engulfs it! Our bed in Florida is a king, so it is destined to live on Moonrise Court. *smile*

Terribly dark pic; taken in 2010.

My backing fabric, bought years ago for this very quilt, was ample at over 8.5 yards. I even remember  getting it at an end-of-bolt sale. You better believe I freed up a lot of space when I removed it from its storage drawer! 

I don't know what sort of force took over, but I somehow found my way clear to tackling the big geometry problem of making my quilt top and that backing fabric come together for an easy longarm installation.  

Because the quilt is so big, I had to load it with the short side along the roller bars; the length of the quilt is longer than the bars, making this the biggest quilt I've done on the Tin Lizzie. This was another reason for my hesitation in quilting it - so big!! I thought would take forever to quilt. Honestly, though, it went relatively fast.

Now, don't for a minute think that the free motion quilting is perfect because it most definitely is not! There are several places where my motions are jerky and quite a mess, but they only show up in the border, and I will ignore them. They will be hanging off the side of the bed; no one will be inspecting them.

I had plenty of backing from which to cut my binding, and have been steadily stitching on that these past couple off days. With only about a yard left to do, I plan to bring you a full-on view of this quilt in tomorrow's post.

 

Happy Quilting, Friends!