Quilting practice

Gosh, I am tired of feeling sick.  It's been all week now and I'm done with this.  Kind of like we're all done with winter, you know?

Not much opportunity for stitching this week, because of the headaches, you know, but I did spend a little bit of time here and there finishing up a piece I had started earlier.  This baby-sized quilt gave me the opportunity to practice some more of the walking foot quilting, plus it got finished and ready to donate for a tiny person to love.  Here is the little quilt:

Say what you will about the pattern, which is a much smaller version of Bonnie Hunter's Grand Illusion quilt, the colors are certainly cheerful, aren't they?  This finished at just 36 inches square, which is actually exactly the size I wanted.  Because this was a quilting practice piece, here is a view of the quilting from the back, which is easier to see:

Not a wrinkle in sight!

My plan for this little piece was to use the walking foot to quilt in the gridded sashing and then to make some free-motion flowers in the larger pink areas.  The walking foot portion went really well, using a bright green thread to outline all the squares in the green and white sashing, then carrying those out into the yellow border.  When it was time for the free-motion part, though, there was sadness:

I have no idea what was happening here, but it just would not work.  I tried and tried, but the stitches kept skipping and the thread kept breaking.  I changed the needle, changed the thread, took the machine  all apart and cleaned it, but nothing helped. I finally gave up because I was afraid of tearing the fabric.  So the next day I pulled out the walking foot again and stitched a starburst effect in each of the pink and black blocks:

I think this was a decent save! It works pretty well with the grid stitching and fills in those blocks pretty well.  It was fairly quick, too.  I don't know why the thread looks so white in the photo.  You know I like thread to match the fabric pretty well, so this thread is a bright pink and definitely looks pink against the black and the other colors.  The only problem I had with this stitching is that it left a lot of thread tails, which then had to be knotted off and trimmed. 

I finished this little quilt with a zippy green machine binding and now it's ready to be donated.  I now have 3 of these 36-inch square quilts to send off, so they are in the box and ready to go and will get to the post office next week. 

I was going to talk some about Leah Day's new book on walking foot quilting, but that's all the energy I have.  It's a good and helpful book, though, and I'll tell you about it another time, I promise!

Blooming forsythia!

Hope this post was coherent, and I hope everyone has a lovely weekend.  I will be resting.  I might pet some fabric, and I did get a good idea for the triangles that I was playing with earlier this week, so there might be a little stitching.  The hubs will be outside working in the yard, so I may need to supervise, but I can do that from the sofa, right?

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, and crazymomquilts.