Sunday, April 29, 2007

Reunited and it feels so good......(humming that song)

I managed to squeeze in an hour of quality bonding time with Ellie (aka one of my sewing machines) today. We decided to try using a machine feather stitch to applique the 50-some letters that make up the sayings on the borders of my niece Maura's quilt.(picture #2) I originally started to applique them down using a hand blanket stitch with pearl cotton floss.( picture #3 - and ,yes this is the same quilt I've posted about a few hundred times already -- and I can hear you all saying -- GET IT DONE ALREADY !) Anyhow, I like the way the hand blanket stitching looks, BUT it's going VERRRRYYY SLLLLLOWLLLY . AND, I decided the hand blanket stitching might not hold up as well as a machine applique stitch. SO --- Ellie and I experimented with machine blanket stitch , machine zig zag and machine feather stitch. We decided we liked how the feather stitch looked the best -- also, since the body of the quilt is pieced like a crazy quilt and the feather stitch was one of the traditional embroidery stitches that was used on that type of quilt, it just seemed like the right choice. We were able to get 4 letters stitched down by machine in under an hour (which may not sound like I got much done, but I have to go around all those curves and circles slowly -- maybe with practice I'll get faster --- even so, it's going faster than the hand stitching was!)

Well, must zoom out to the grocery store now -- the cupboards are bare !

Toodles,
Mary Anne (aka Mare)

2 comments:

Busy Little Quilter said...

I love it, Mary Ann! I'm glad you finally reunited.

OldBagNewTricks said...

I knew you'd be much happier when you sat down, gripped the sides of that machine and heaved that sigh of relief. It doesn't get better than that.

And you've been tagged by me in a 7 Weird Things About You Game. Come peek at my blog to see the rules. It's fun and easy.