Quilty experiment

Hi folks! How was your week? Hope you got tons of things done, with time left over for some stitching, and that you had lots of sunshine. We had a cold and gray week, but I did get many things done, including a really exciting thing for work. It feels great to have that done, though I'm probably going to keep on tweaking it for a little while longer. I also had some time to sew.

The big thing I accomplished this week was to quilt up the Birds in the Air quilt:

Back on the fence!

All quilted, but no binding yet.  This was quilted on the 1966 Pfaff 362, using the embroidery unit. I don't think the embroidery functions had ever really been used. Maybe tested, but not used for any length of time. Pretty sure that my mother-in-law only used it for hemming and mending, and not at all for a good 15 years. I followed the directions in the manual--and thank goodness I had that!--and oiled the heck out of it and it sewed like a dream. It took some work to get all the settings right, but I really love this machine, even if it is cast iron and a real workout to lift and move around. A cabinet would be useful, but even if I could find one I don't know where I'd put it.

Since this wasn't an heirloom quilt or anything like that, I kept playing with the settings and stitch length and such and got some really fun wavy lines:

They're all different, but I don't care. It was an experiment to play with those stitches. I think it came out fine. Lots of texture! It will get a scrappy binding, probably this weekend. That uses up all that fabric! There's a win for sure.

One side effect of working on this was that now I want to make a "real" Birds in the Air quilt. I have pictures of some floors in the Vatican that look like quilt blocks, and one of them looks like a Birds quiltin dark jewel tones. Time to break out the list again!

I only finished quilting up the one top, but I did baste three of them, including the elephant quilt and the baby quilt sampler, and started stitching the pink baby quilt. I forgot how much time the actual quilting takes! I love having a room where I can just leave it and come back to it later. The elephants also got eyes and other details:

 

Nobody wants blind elephants! I don't know how anyone else did it, but these are just satin stitches using the regular machine. I put two layers of tear-away stabilizer behind the eyes because the first attempt without it turned out really awful. I wonder if I've ever made a quilt where I didn't have to rip out something. Have you?

Finally, one of the best things to happen to me this week: 

Those are day lily shoots! (And a few really hardy weeds. What will ever get rid of those things?) They're only about an inch high, so I nearly stepped on these on my way to pin the quilt to the fence. I am so, so excited to see these, even if we will have temperatures in the teens again this weekend. There will be flowers at some point!

Hope everyone has a great weekend. I expect to have time to quilt up those other two small quilts because there will be basketball again. And more basketball. And I'm pretty sure more basketball after that. Ah, well! It's only a few weeks a year! (And, whew! Wisconsin won Thursday.) Sunday is Palm Sunday, which means Easter is right around the corner. Can the end of the tournament be far behind?

Linking to Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and  Link a Finish Friday. Happy sewing!