End of February, Hello March: One Monthly Goal + Carrie's 2024 Philadelphia Temperatures Quilt Finish

Good morning, my lovelies!  It's the last day of February, time to take stock of what I did and didn't accomplish last month and make plans for the fresh, clean month ahead of me.  First, I'd like to share the quilt that I longarm quilted for my client Carrie.  This is the one I was having issues with thread breaking and shredding, prompting me to spend three days ripping out stitches and then requilt with a different kind of thread and a different quilting design, so I'm extremely relieved that it's done, off my plate, out of my house, and returned to Carrie:

Carrie's 60 x 76 Philadelphia Temperatures Quilt

If you're not familiar with "temperature quilts," the concept is to select fabrics across the color spectrum and assign one fabric color to each temperature range in a particular location, from the coldest temperatures of the year (the blues in Carrie's quilt) to the hottest temperatures (represented by the reds in this example).  Carrie has also used white and a silvery gray to represent snow or rain.  The edge-to-edge quilting design I used on this quilt was Whitney's Pearls Simple, which yields a similar look to the Raindrops On Water design we had originally selected, but without any backtracking quilting stitches that needed to stitch precisely over previously stitched lines of quilting.  Quilters Dream Wool batting is creating that beautiful dimensional texture without weight, making this a soft and snuggly quilt for cuddling despite the density of the quilting.  I used So Fine thread in color Genoa Gray.

Carrie Machine Embroidered Her Temperature Key At the Bottom

Carrie used foundation paper piecing to create the top border titling her quilt and machine embroidered her temperature key on the bottom border.  The many thick, overlapping seam allowances in the FPP top border may have been a contributing factor to the thread breaking constantly, but it wasn't the only culprit as the issue continued throughout the quilt.  I'm going to have my Bernina dealer out to check my hook for burrs before I attempt to quilt anything else.  

Here's what Carrie's beautiful quilt top looked like when she sent it to me for quilting:

Carrie's Quilt Top Before Quilting

Thank you for entrusting me with so many of your quilts, Carrie!  

I have so enjoyed collaborating with quilters like Carrie over the years that I was long arm quilting professionally.  However, my husband and I have decided that I am done quilting for others after this project.  Even with the majority of quilts that go smoothly, when my machine is in top working order and I don't have to spend additional days unpicking stitches, I still would spend hours and hours standing at the machine, loading the quilt, setting up the design in the computer, supervising the machine to ensure I was there to stop it the moment the tension was off or if a thread loop happened to form in an otherwise perfect line of stitching.  Add that to the time spend communicating with clients about quilting designs and thread colors ahead of time, plus administrative time spent invoicing, shipping, etc. -- if I needed to do this for the money, I would earn a higher hourly wage bagging groceries or greeting at Walmart than I did quilting for hire.  But the real downside of quilting for hire is that the time I spent quilting other people's projects was stolen from myself, time that would have otherwise been spent working on my own projects.  Furthermore, when things go badly on one of my own quilts, it's way, WAY less stressful than when a disaster strikes with a quilt top belonging to someone else who has entrusted it to me!  

These were my goals for February:

• ✓ Continue unpacking and organizing sewing supplies

• ✓ Continue making Stonefields hexie rosettes

My Stonefield Quilt Border Hexies Are Accumulating on My Design Wall

• ✓ Start cutting triangles for Stonefields flying geese border

Started Cutting Flying Geese Triangles from Scraps for Stonefields Inner Border

• 🅧 Put my FrankenWhiggish blocks on the design wall
• 🅧 Prep and sew the next Stonefields appliqué blocks
• ✓ Quilt & Return Carrie's 2024 Philadelphia Temperature Quilt (this one was on my list privately, even though I didn't list it on last month's blog post)

Okay, so I DID work on all these things this month.  I decided I don't want to put my FrankenWhiggish blocks on the design wall after all, since they would just be taking up real estate that I'm using to keep track of how the colors and values are working together in my Stonefields quilt.  One note to self: as I realized the end of the month was approaching, I had to go back and look at last month's OMG post because I couldn't remember what goals I had set -- that's when I saw that I'd wanted to start rough cutting triangles from scraps for the Stonefields flying geese border.  This is probably obvious to most of you, but it just dawned on me that maybe I would be more successful in reaching these monthly goals if I posted them somewhere in my sewing room where I could see them every day.  🙄  Duh...

Looking forward to March:

• Clean up this God-awful, paralyzing MESS!  If there really only was ONE monthly goal for March, that would be the big one.  I don't even want to come into this room right now.

No Room to Work at This Worktable!

Climbing Over Everything Strewn Across the Floor

• Continue new studio setup, esp. come up with book storage solution (I have a large collection of sewing and quilting books that I refer to again and again, and I need STRONG shelving to support the weight of all those books that are currently piled up on the floor)
• Prep and sew the next Stonefields appliqué blocks: Have not been able to do this because of the mess in my studio.  I need to clear off my worktable to make room for the light box before I can prep those appliqué blocks.
• Make progress with jeans alterations that I've been sewcrastinating for over a year (back waist needs to be taken in on multiple pairs): I recently learned that someone teaches these alterations at a local shop!  I sent an email inquiry to the teacher and am thinking of either taking the 3-hour class with other students or else scheduling a private lesson 
• Work on hand quilting my Deco Bed Quilt: I began experimenting with that one evening last week, sitting in the middle of the floor where the quilt remains.  I was not happy with my initial quilting stitches and stopped to do more research.  My back was not happy with sitting on the floor, either...

These Stitches Are Too Big For My Liking and Will Be Ripped Out

• Special NewFO blog post about a New York Beauty project I've been working on in my EQ8 software...  I bought the AccuQuilt BOB die for this at QuiltCon.
• Make stuffed berries for FrankenWhiggish Rose blocks: Only if I get to everything else first.  You know, like if this year March has 3,001 days instead of just 31.

Hey, speaking of QuiltCon -- We went, we had fun, I took a lot of pictures, and I will share more about trends I saw at the show in a future blog post, when/if I get around to it.  Here is my shopping haul from the vendor mall:

QuiltCon Shopping: Liberty Fabrics, Heavy Wonderfil Threads + NYB AccuQuilt Die

Predictably, Bernie was horrified when I started shopping at the show.  He tried to rein me in by refusing to help carry any of my packages so I would have to stop spending money once my arms were full.  The small cuts of Liberty fabrics were from Brimfield Awakening and Duckadilly, and I immediately made up these two hexie rosettes in Liberty fabrics as soon as I got home because a fellow quilter shopping next to me at the show was telling me she can't bear to cut into any of her Liberty fabrics -- I didn't want that to be me!  The SewTites Dots are just smaller versions of those other magnets I've been using for EPP of my 3/4" hexies.  That New York Beauty AccuQuilt die is for the EQ8 project on my list for this month, and the threads are #8 perle cotton Eleganza and 12 wt cotton Spagetti and Fruitti threads for adding hand quilting to my partially machine quilted Deco Quilt.

Just briefly back to the hand quilting on Deco:

Big Stitch Hand Quilting Looks Too Big To Me

To my eye (and it's my quilt, so my eye is the only one that matters), the "big stitch" hand quilting here is too disproportionately long of a stitch length to complement the previous machine stitching.  When I did that stitching, I was trying to hand quilt the same way I was taught to hand quilt with traditional waxed cotton quilting thread, a tiny Betweens needle, and a rocking stitch where I would stack multiple stitches onto my needle before pulling the thread through.  Using a much larger needle with the Wonderfil 12 wt, 3-ply thread, I could not achieve smaller stitches using this method.

So I went to my phone's camera roll from QuiltCon, found the photo of the quilt with my favorite hand quilting stitch length, followed by the photo I took of the quiltmaker's information posted next to the quilt:

Detail of Parallax by Danielle Stanfill

One of the great things about the QuiltCon show tags identifying each quilt is that they include the maker's Instagram handle.  Danielle Stanfill, the maker of this gorgeous blue-ribbon-winning abstract quilt, is @thequiltedhand and I was able to learn a lot about her process for hand quilting with heavyweight threads by looking back through her Instagram posts.  My best tip for anyone wanting to learn a new skill is to find your favorite example of that skill and then find out how THAT person achieves those results.  I already know that lots of modern quilters do big stitch quilting in different ways, but the dainty little quilt stitches that blew ME away and that I would like to emulate on my quilt were done using a two-handed stab stitching technique with the quilt sandwich in a hoop, like this:

Danielle Stanfill Hand Quilting On an Airplane

So, once I clean up my floor and clear a spot in a comfortable chair with good lighting, that's what I'm going to try next with my Deco Quilt.  Stay tuned!

I'm linking up today's post with the following linky parties:

ONE MONTHLY GOAL

Anne-Marie at Stories From the Sewing Room

MONDAY

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts  

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs  

TUESDAY

To-Do Tuesday at Quilt Schmilt  

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter

THURSDAY

Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation  

FRIDAY

Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

Off the Wall Friday at Nina Marie Sayre

Beauty Pageant at From Bolt to Beauty

 TGIFF Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday, rotates, schedule found here: TGIF Friday

SUNDAY

Frédérique at Quilting Patchwork Appliqué

Slow Stitching Sunday at Kathy's Quilts

Oh Scrap! at Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework