I spent 12 hours yesterday free-motion quilting the Pepper Dish Quilt. I am leaving next week on a road trip, and I want to take this along to do the handwork while I am traveling. Most of my bindings, hanging sleeves and labels are sewn on while we are traveling along at 55 mph.
Click Images to Enlarge:
After the machine quilting was complete, I blocked the quilt top and hung it up on the design wall too cool off a bit. I will square up the edges later. This was a good time for a photo session.
Unfortunately, I had a piece of thread jam between my tension discs and I tried to remove it but it broke off.......I was not happy.......and neither was my machine. The tension was never quite right after that and I was having a lot of thread breakage, which I never have with my Bernina. It is off to the repair shop this week.
Overall I am happy with the machine quilting. The feather was a good choice for the curvy border. I kept the thread colors low contrast so they would blend and not draw too much attention away from the quilt top itself. There are a lot of different fabrics in this quilt, and I didn't want the thread colors competing with them.
If you look closely, you can see where Judy Neimeyer, the pattern designer, has signed my quilt. I made this quilt top in a 3 day workshop with Judy in Idaho in 2006.
When my repaired and freshly cleaned Bernina comes back from the shop I plan to rip out a few stitches on this and fix all the places where the tension was poor. Normally I wouldn't go to this extreme, but I plan to show this quilt and I need it to be the best it can be.
I added this photo to show you just what flash photography can do to a quilt. It completely bleaches all the color out of it and distorts the color. In this photo the green border appears blue, and the gold background looks pale grayish yellow. When photographing your quilts.....turn the flash OFF on your camera. Lighting from the sides is best when shooting indoors. On a non-windy and overcast day, outdoor photography is my favorite.p.s. To see more Pepper Dish Click HERE
To see more Exhibit Quilts CLICK HERE
May Your Bobbin Always Be Full,
LuAnn