Stitching in the Barn

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...

I was happily quilting along when this happened! If you click on the picture you'll see long threads on the back. They snapped and I couldn't see them on top so I kept quilting. When I finished this block I found them. I tied the ones I could find both ends to off and threaded them into the quilt. I re-threaded my machine and still had snapped threads. So I took out the bobbin to check it and that's when I found that I accidentally knocked the feed dog lever up a bit and they were catching the thread and breaking it. This might not happen on a modern machine but I love how it quilts & now I know to check that lever when I put in a new bobbin! Since this quilt is for me and a wall quilt, I'm not too fussed about it. I'm going to leave the over-stitched threads on the back and pretend they're not there.

Today I stitched & turned it with the batting & the backing and did the stitch in the ditch to prep it for free-motion quilting. I used Purple thread from Connecting Threads and I love how it looks. I used a tip I picked up recently. I used hairspray as basting spray to stick the two layers that weren't getting turned together. Since it was a small quilt & I had an old can of Aquanet hanging around I thought I'd try it and it worked very well. I didn't even have to go outside for better ventilation to use it. I sprayed it on both sides to be sure it stuck and everything went fine. There were no puckers on the back side of my quilt, just on the top that was only pin basted.

These are my two wonderful machines that I do my piecing and quilting on: