Second Quarter FAL 2013 goals

As the first quarter finish along is wrapping up I have to post my second quarter goals.

First and foremost is my second blue&white baby quilt which I named N Blu at the almost finished stage. I've been working on the quilting, but pulled a muscle in my forearm and had to take a break for a few days. Otherwise it would've been finished by the end of March. Too bad :( But on a higher note this will be my fastest first finish in a quarter for sure :)

I keep working on the monkey quilt, top is done, back is half pieced.

After that's done I need to keep marching down on Easy Street. When I laid it out at my friend's  house on the floor I realized that it's simply humongous. I deserve it. And will definitely deserve to feel relieved when it'll be done. Can't wait! It's in a more advanced stage than the picture shows, but I'm at home now and don't have a big enough floor space to spread it out and take a photo. Bummer... the missing blocks are  obvious :)

I still have my Christmas quilt to finished to which I saw a really cool technique at the end of Leah Day's Craftsy class so I will be using her method for sure to put the quilt together.

I haven't done anything with these squares:

My bag is still without lining and handle... :) Maybe I should do that first for a quick finish!

I will not list the roses since I know I will not get  to them. I want to start Kimberly Einmo's mystery Craftsy class in the mean time, plus there's the double wedding ring quilt needing to be started... LOL, right? :)

That's all for my goals, hoping to finish even more than I did in the last quarter!

'Til we blog again! :)

N Blu

Hey Everybody,

I'm glad you're back! I have good news! I finished  the second Craftsy BOM baby quilt. Yippeeee!

After having HELL with the previous one  I decided that I had to take action. Originally I had my vintage Singer 201 set up for FMQ-ing only, dropped the feed dogs and installed the darning foot on it as soon as I bought it a year ago. I remembered that dropping the feed dogs involved some kind of screwing, but didn't remember how. I looked it up in the manual and realized it  was quiet easy to do. So I raised the feed dogs back up and installed the second walking foot I bought for this machine and decided to stitch in the  ditch around the blocks. I also changed threads and matched the thread color to the fabrics. With that said I ended up re-threading the machine with every single block, but I didn't mind.  In her Craftsy free motion quilting a sampler class Leah Day suggested to use  Isacord polyester thread so I gave it a try. I only ordered white and blue, the 2 colors I wanted to use in this quilt. Bingo! It quilted beautifully, never broke and didn't have any problem with it whatsoever.
I also tried out the suggested Supreme Slider for the first time. When I begin free motion quilting with it someone asked me on Twitter if it makes a difference and I wasn't sure. But then at the end I  had to change bobbin and I only had a  little bit of quilting left so I didn't put the slider back on the machine and I felt the difference. I'm glad I used it because quilting was a lot easier with it. I taped it down as Leah suggested in her class and it was a breeze to quilt with.
I went pretty much with her suggestion for quilting, except for the wonky log cabin block where She quilted a giganto spiral and I decided to do concentric circles instead. I designed a very cool quilt in EQ7 and want to quilt that one with the concentric circles and wanted to try out how it works. I just got a jar lid and drew the first circle in the middle, than a bigger jar lid and drew a second circle, after that I pretty much had to eyeball it :) It came out fine with  a few corners in the beginning, but it's OK. It's not a show quilt anyways :) Again my Crayola washable markers didn't disappoint. They came out with very little washing with no problem.

Originally I wanted to finish this quilt by March  31 so I could link it  up in the First Quarter FAL 2013, but I had so much help from my kitties that I had to postpone the deadline. This way it became my very first finish for the Second Quarter FAL! I don't think I've ever finished anything this fast in the FAL, haha!

I wanted to take pictures outside, but in the shade there's not enough light and the whole background looks blue instead of white. I was forced to take the photos in our bedroom. Boohoo.

Front:

Back:

Close-up of  each block:

And the daffodils finally opened outside!