My first IQ project!

I had saved the last of the Sweet Menagerie Nine Patch quilts just so I could try my first pantograph on the IntelliQuilter out on it.  If I screwed it up, I wasn’t going to worry about it as I didn’t much care for this last one.  I had the better part of some jelly roll of Christmas fabrics I wanted to use up, and this quilt was it.

 I used lime green thread!  I wish it showed up better in the pictures, but I’m too lazy to pull out the stand and set up the tripod.

This panto was incredibly dense, and took forever to sew out.  I used almost an entire spool of thread! I figured if I could successfully line up something this densely quilted with the new system, I wasn’t going to have any problem with any other pantograph! 

I’ll probably bind this and donate it… it doesn’t have a home and I don’t have a destination planned for it yet, but I will find a good home for it.  The worst part of winter is coming up and it will keep someone in my community warm! 

I learned quite a bit with this one… I’m probably not doing a panto the most efficient way, and whatever I did certainly didn’t match up with either the book I have or the video I watched, but it worked well enough and made sense to me.

Finished the quilting

One the second Sweet Menagerie nine patch quilt last night.

 King Tut thread, it’s a variegated pink and brown, Hobbs 80/20 batting, and the pantograph is “Swirly Gig” by Judy Allen.

I wanted to get it done as I have a guild meeting this morning, so I could take it along.  Yay!

At four o’clock this morning, I turned my oven on…

And added a little bit of heaven to my day!  Did you know that you can buy scrumptious chocolate croissants from Williams Sonoma and have them shipped in on dry ice?  You thaw them and let them rise for nine hours, and pop them into the oven.  Gracious!  A girl could die and go to heaven! 

Very cool color wheel!

I don’t typically have too much trouble choosing colors for my quilts (of course you might think my color choices are awful, taste is subjective!) but I ran across this wonderful online color wheel.

It’s fantastic!  I could spend an hour just playing with it!

I had planned to get most of the quilting done yesterday on the purple and green nine patch… instead I spent almost the entire day frogging out a row of bad tension, aaaggghhh!

But it’s done and I’m back to quilting on it, I have an entire pass done!  LOL

 Pink and brown variegated King Tut thread on this one.  I do not have a destination in mind for this quilt yet.  A possible one… but I haven’t decided yet.

In the local classifieds, a church is selling some oak church pews.  How I would love to buy one for the future studio!  But they’re sixteen feet long, and I’m afraid one would probably be a poor choice of wall space usage.  I could use it as a fabric shelf, would that look cool or what! 

Go see what everyone else is up to this “work in progress Wednesday”!

Holding my breath...

Crossing my fingers, toes, and probably my spine before I’m through, but here’s hoping to finish the tshirt quilt today without further frogging!

Perhaps I would do better to set aside the coffee this morning and instead set myself up with some shots of tequila?  Mmm… that could get downright dangerous, I’m an extreme lightweight!

All in all, it’s turning out well enough.  I can only quilt one handed on this… left handed at that, since the other hand has to remain free to keep taming the squirmy shirts, and old lefty just isn’t as talented as I’d like her to be!

I’m just doing some random swirls freehand, it feels so strange for me to work from the front of the machine as I rarely do!

I’m on a mission to use up all the Bali strips I have in my stash…. two quilts down and the next will be coming from a mix of blues and greens.

I was going to make another of the Sweet Menagerie Nine Patches with these, but I’ve enough of these colors to do something else… perhaps another Bali Sea Star like I made Jim last year? 

I finished binding the wacky log cabin yesterday, and got it washed and dried. I had originally planned to sell it, but as I was binding it I decided it would make a perfect Christmas present for my grandson this year.

When I finished the purple and green quilt in the post below, I think I’ll send it to my sister-in-law in Missouri, she’s recently opened an art gallery/gift shop and see if it sells.