A Quilted Finish!

I loaded a quilt on Monday and quilted it! I promised myself as I began this year that I would quilt a minimum of two quilts each month. I did a baby quilt earlier and now I have done this one, so I am hitting my goal in these first two months of 2020.

I made Simple Sixteen in very late December of 2018, a super easy, super fast quilt with 30's prints. I wrote about it in this post.

I got along great with my quilting until the last 30 inches or so of the final pass of the machine. I began having threads breaking - it was very, very aggravating. I don't know for sure what the trouble was, but I switched out the bobbin, and after that I finished without incident. I did all the usual troubleshooting: rethread the machine, clean out the lint. Since it was the bobbin thread that was breaking, I checked the bobbin tension, and then I changed the bobbin. I don't know. Do some prewound bobbins cause problems? I will ask around.

 So here she is, trimmed up and draped over the Tin Lizzie. I will prep the binding from the excess of backing; I hope I can get it all finished up this week.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Final Post of 2018

But NOT my final post ever. I have decided that I want to continue to blog, and after giving the entire situation a good amount of pondering, I do think I can keep it going. I will talk more on this in the coming days; for now, I want to show you my final project for 2018.

Simple Sixteen is a free pattern I found several months ago, and as I wanted to get one more fast finish in before year's end, this was perfect for easy, satisfying work. The pattern comes from a company called Fort Worth Fabric Studio, and the website has quite a few very attractive free patterns available. I do expect that I will make some of them.

So on Wednesday, the day after Christmas, I cut these out. The original pattern is a 9-block design, but they tell you that it can easily be enlarged which I did. I had enough 30s prints on hand to make 20 blocks.

By last evening (Sunday) I put the final rows together. It was fun and pretty much mindless. Just the type of project my brain needed after all the hustle-bustle of the month.

My stitching had really slowed these past few weeks and I believe this lack of sewing was my major reason for fewer blog posts. Sometimes a break is a good thing, though. I definitely had lots going on around here, which took precedence over stitching. Finally, when an easy project presents itself for those days that linger between Christmas and New Year, grab on and go with it!

Have a safe New Year's Eve, if you are going out to celebrate. We will go to Harold and Judy's with our friends Bob and Vickie - the 6 of us have been doing New Years for 25 years, I think.

Happy New Year and Happy Quilting, Friends!