Cold Crafts... :(

Although this is my favorite time of year, there hasn't been much time to do the things I LOVE doing... crafts.  I like to make things for gifts but this year there wasn't time around school...school went well, really enjoyed it, learned a lot, can't wait for next semester.... but I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to make something, anything... I have far too much crafting material to not be making something... yes, I am having craft withdrawals... sigh...

Life can be overwhelming

So I finished the quilt but I haven't got to posting pics yet... will do that soon... I LOVED LOVED LOVED the Gutermann thread!!!  Thanks to my friend Nancy for that awesome suggestion!!!  School has been very busy so that has taken up most of my life aside from being a Mommy of 3 wonderful children, so obviously I haven't had my hands in any crafts lately and my sewing machine thinks I have abandoned her...  there are a lot of things I want to work on but I haven't had the chance but one thing at a time.... I am going to post pics soon of the finished quilt and then pick another project to work on!!!

Breaking thread... not fun!

The free motion quilting has been going really well until my thread started breaking.... and not just once or twice but about 2 seconds after I would get started up again it would break again.  Needless to say I was very frustrated and had to walk away and take a break.  I have been doing a lot of reading on the internet trying to find other people's opinions on machine quilting thread and discovered that many out there have had the same experience that I have had with the particular brand of thread that I was using.  I found a lot of great suggestions and I am in the process of trying one out, Gutermann, and so far it has been working great, not a single break yet.  I only have a little more to quilt but at the moment I am letting my machine have a break to cool down.  Hopefully here soon I can post some pics so you can see how it looks... it's not perfect by no means, but I think it isn't too bad for my very first FMQ experience.

Machine Quilting - Finishing Up

Yesterday I tried machine quilting for the first time... I used a walking foot and did straight lines and that didn't work out so well.  After ripping those stitches out I knew I had to do something different so I tried free motion quilting using the stippling design.  At first that didn't work out well at all, once I got started going good the thread would break... so I thought it was a tension issue, and it wasn't.  So after a few hours of that I decided to try a different machine and WOW!!!  It worked like a charm!!!  So I am still not sure what the problem was with the first machine (my very old Kenmore rescued from the Goodwill store) but my other machine (brand new Singer) worked like a champ... that's funny cause my Kenmore aka Shirley, always gets the job done, but not this time...

Yea! I started a blog!

I have wanted to start a blog for a while now but never thought I had the time... until today... I realized that if I spent half the time I do playing games on facebook then I had plenty of time to start a blog.  So today I have traded in my games for blogging!  I am currently working on my first custom order quilt but there is still so much that I have to learn about quilting and I am at a stand still due to lack of knowledge/experience.  I am attempting to machine quilt for the first time and I keep running into tucks and puckers and they are very frustrating... once I get past this I will be done and that feeling of "completion" is a GREAT feeling... well, it's back to exploring the internet for information and great ideas so that I can complete this project and move on to the next.