Monthly Archives: March 2012

I am working on a quilt that is a gift for a friend, but mostly what I’m doing right now is swearing.

This quilt has had it’s share of problems.  I’ll go into more detail later but for now let’s focus on my immediate stress:  My machine is randomly puking black dust that seems like eyeliner flakes onto my WHITE WHITE WHITE quilt top as I free-motion quilt this beauty.   I had my machine professionally serviced a year ago and am very, very good at cleaning it regularly with a paint-brush.  I’m not sure what’s going on… and I can’t clean it more thoroughly because it has a computer brain inside I don’t want to funk with even if I could figure out how to access more of it’s insides.

one of many black smudges of sadness

So what do I do?  I’ve decided I’m going to keep going and quilt the whole blanket – stopping frequently to take brush-out-the-dust breaks and to just give the machine a second to catch its breath (this is an intense quilting pattern of little, unattached clouds).   After it’s all quilted I will stain-treat the stains, throw it in the wash, and pray and wish and hope.   I can’t very well wash this with it only half quilted and I don’t want to put stain-treatment on the spots too early in fear of there being new damage caused by too-long exposure to the cleaning chemicals.

Barf barf.  Wish me luck.

Remember back when I declared it Swoon-vember?  Well now, 4 months later, I’m finally buckling down on my very own Swoon quilt.   Many other people have been rockin’ the Swoon – check out the ~900 members in the flickr Swoon-a-long group!

This is quilt is important because it’s actually going to STAY in this house and be used every day on my very own couch.  That’s right – this one’s for ME.  And believe me, blankets matter in this 100 year old house that is insulated with what I can only assume are balled-up napkins.

I’m making my blocks using just two colors (in a variety of fabrics) and an ivory background: raspberry reds and toasty tans.

My color combinations (and adorable husband)

So I cut all of the pieces out in one or two power sessions – and set the plan to do this in as few super intense chain-piecing sessions as possible.  This requires crazy organization – check out my shoebox o’ HSTs and a file folder with colors divided in sheet protectors.

But WOMP WOMP I cut everything before I discovered the Swoon community (was it even there back in November?) and their wise advice posted in the forums. As a result I DID cut those pesky squares for my HSTs at 3 7/8inches instead of 4inches… and now it’s time to square-up my HST blocks and the outlook was GRIM.

I stopped chain-piecing long enough to focus on one block and see if this was possible.

The result is… good, not great.

::ahem::

I think it’s definitely worth pushing forward.  Once it’s quilted, I bet these little off-points will be even more unnoticeable.

Pulling out the starch and my prayer-rug.  Wish me luck wrestling my Swoon!  There’s no going back after having cut-up this much fabric…