Lovely Lurex!!!!

More Misadventures with Metallic Thread!

It's been a whole week up on the frame with this extra large quilt top from Sue-  more metallic thread and lurex! It loaded up relatively easily; I had learned from experience, from the last oversized quilt I did for her, how to fit it on the frame with the minimum excess bulk. The metallic thread, however, was a nightmare from the start.  Same tension issues and skipped stitches as before. It must be something I'm doing wrong. To begin with, for every hour of productive stitching - I had to do 3 hours unpicking! 

But I tamed it in the end and finished it today. I liked the black and orange combination, but not sure that the lurex added much. 

Meanwhile, down in the sewing room, I've worked out the design for Christopher's rainbow quilt. I thought I'd been so clever and found a set of rainbow coloured mechanical pencils for colouring in the design sheet.

When I started to use them, however, it turned out they all had grey lead inside!! DOH!!







This month at Studio Quilters, Viv started us off on this wonderful technique from Jenny Rayment's 'Tucks, Textures and Pleats' book. 

Great opportunity to try out some decorative stitches on the Brother machine - very effective on this folded calico background. I can feel a cushion coming on! 





And here is the result of another little experiment this week:

I was trying out the 'Simply Squares' block (from the book by Sarah Wellfair of Goose Chase Quilting) starting with a smaller square - 2 1/4" instead of 3 1/2".

But it took forever to grow, so I stopped and made them into these two little pincushions. I had intended to demonstrate the method to the U3A group this week, but we ran out of time. It will keep until next month.

So now it's back to that rainbow. I've done yellow and orange so far. 

This one is going to be fun!

Happy Quilting Everyone!

Janet

www.englishquilter.co.uk   

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