Talk About Distracted...

Here's my excuse.... Joe had abdominal surgery on Wednesday.  He's fine now but will be a long recovery.  We were up at 5 as we had to be to downtown Detroit by 6:30am for and 8:30 surgery.  I was exhausted by the time I got home so all I did was eat and go to bed.  Up the next morning and out the door by 8.  We had a "class" scheduled for 10 for post-op care.  I thought we would be out by noon.  I should know better after the 2 years of Mom being in and out of the hospital.  Cut to the end-we walked out of the hospital at 4:15.

My whole world is out of whack.  I have to sleep on the opposite side of the bed as usual because of Joe's wound.  It's really thrown me off!   I've also had almost 200 more people asking to join the Facebook group in the past 3 days!  And Colleen came home for the weekend!

I did start back on the Quilt Along.  The first one I did was on scale and how to keep it consistent using a pencil width, your index finger or a spool of thread.

Week 3 Quilt Along  Scale  Medium and small scale.

Scale-top to bottom: Large, small, medium

My supervisor-Guapo

Week 4 Quilt along.  Quilting on lines.

Practicing doing straight-line quilting while free motion.  It does take practice.  It doesn't show up well on the pictures but the first few were ugly.  I got better with practice.  I then outlined round the instruments.

I did work on my hand-piecing while Joe was in surgery.  I got quite a bit done and hope to finish this block tonight.  I then need to figure out the direction I want to take with the entire quilt.

Getting ready to put all the pieces together.

Yesterday I finished piecing the top of Bryn's tee-shirt quilt.  One of the things I don't think I've mentioned is I like to use my walking foot when working with the tee shirts even though they have been stabilized.  I'm putting on the borders with the walking foot.

Pinned and ready to be stitched.

Walking foot with the needle in the center position

I then take my ruler and position the 1/4" mark with the edge of the walking foot.  I adjust the needle over so it will stitch 1/4" from the edge of the foot.

Fabric lined up with the edge of the walking foot

Off we go!

I did get the whole top done with borders and it's bigger than I anticipated!  The good news is that it will cover a queen sized bed with a good drop.  The bad news is I don't have a good place to photograph the whole thing!  I had to do it in sections while it was lying on Bryn's bed.  Then the last picture was flipped correctly in iPhoto but didn't flip when I transfered them over here.  Oh well.  Use your imagination!  

I'm going to try to get some more quilting done today.  I have to see if I have backing in my stash or if I have to go get some.

I think I'm going to get completely caught up with the Quilt Along before I start quilting the tee-shirt quilt so I won't have to unload and re-load the quilt even though I am doing it on my domestic machine.

Off to quilt!

Happy Stitching!