Quilting inspiration

I finally got back to quilting the borders of my quilt this past weekend. I bought some green variegated YLI machine quilting thread to encourage me.
I did some warm up quilting with this thread, pulled it out and got ready to put my quilt under the needle when I saw this:

I have never gotten a spool of thread with a tie in it. I'm sure it happens but if I had found this on the top of my quilt I think I would have been upset. The thing was, I hadn't done much quilting before the tie so why include it in the spool. I guess it's because it's machines doing the work and people are not even watching them anymore. This knot wouldn't even go through my needle. I could have had a major thread break if I hadn't noticed this.

I finally sat down and free motion quilted some swirly loops in a density to match the rest of the quilting. I gave up after 2 of the 4 borders were quilted because it was boring, really, really boring. I started another project instead. I'll post about that later.

While taking a break on the new project, I checked my Google Reader and saw this post by Sandi at Piecemeal Quilts blog. She just finished a beautiful quilt that had been sitting on her frame for 6 months! Within the quilting, she wrote words. When I saw that, I knew that was what I needed to excite me about finishing the quilting! I commented on her post and she wrote a nice email back to me.

 

On her advice, I wrote up a list of words to quilt into my quilt with the theme of sewing. I've only got a few in so far but I love it. My writing is not nearly as pretty as hers but we all have to start somewhere. My machine also threads from left to right and doesn't like quilting in that direction very much.

At the end of each word, I quilted a heart. This is the back of the quilt because I don't want to show the front until it's finished. The words are hidden within a lot of loops and some wavy lines to match the denseness of the rest of the quilting and to hide my first attempts.

In the picture above the word "Sew" starts with the spiral and under that is the word "fabric" both ending in a heart on the left. I love the thought that I have these "secret" words in here. Now I just need to practice writing backwards to make it flow on my machine better.