Sunday, December 4, 2011

AZ. Huggy Bunch Quilters

Saturday BJ and Lauren came to sew with me. Lauren has a quilt project that is urgent and she was needing some help so BJ and I combined our efforts to help sash this quilt ready for borders.


Lauren has a dear friend at her place of employment who has been desperately ill since October and who is actually comatose. This quilt is filled with loving messages from his friends who want him back amongst them.
Fritz could use every prayer you wish to offer.
I will be quilting it as a soon as the top comes back from Lauren with the borders completed, probably tomorrow.

This pretty quilt of lovely warm reds and golds came off the LA this afternoon- it's made mostly from batiks that can be challenging to quilt as the the tight weave can cause skipped stitches and frequent thread breakage. Generally I have little problems with batiks but this one did cause some annoying thread issues. I used silicon on the thread and thread path, backed off the top tension and slightly loosened that of the actual quilt sandwich and then as a last resort turned the needle on the machine slightly to the right.
This last idea is often suggested by other professional quilters and machine techs, and I am not exactly sure why it works, but I think it helps to take some stress off the thread path.
It is quilted with Sew Fine and Bottom Line threads from Superior, feather wreaths in the blocks and feathers in setting triangles and border.
With these tactics I managed to get it done and it will be mailed back to the owner this week.


The pic below taken without flash shows the quilting design better though the color is not accurate. Leslie said this quilt was going to remain a pile of blocks but the addition of the beautiful batik border and now the quilting has transformed it into a lovely quilt!

No comments: