To Do Tuesday #52

Looking for my list for this week I realised that I forgot to put up a new list up on my post last week. Well, never mind, I did work on finishing off my cat quilt.

For the cat quilt I decided to do an edge-to-edge design over it. I am doing this on a sitdown longarm machine and I have talked about this on my blog several times on how I do this (for example, HERE). I purchased the Ginger Paw design from Urban Elementz designed by Melonie J. Caldwell and Apricot Moon Designs and went to work. The design is 8-1/4in wide so first of all I had to reduce it a little bit as I was not sure how I would go with such a wide design. I made mine 7-3/4in, printed out multiple copies and sticky taped this together into one long row.

The quilt measures 56.5in x 66.5in and I was unsure whether I could pull this off with using paper over the entire width of the quilt. Normally I do little baby quilts with this method which works really well, however they are usually not bigger than 36in. Was quite nervous about it, but if you never try, you'll never know. Took my time with aligning my row and used both pins and sticky dots to hold the paper on the quilt. This is what this looked like at the machine.

I have a Bernina Q20 with the very large Koala table, but still needed to crunch this up a fair bit so that it did not hang off the table. Starting it was a bit of a nightmare as I was struggling against the weight of the quilt. In addition, the weather over here was incredibly humid and I think that affected how easily my quilt was gliding around on the table. Sometimes I used gloves to hold it but sometimes I was doing better without gloves. It got easier after the first row, however then I started struggling with those little toe pads in the design. Funny enough the width of the design did not give me any problems and I found that I could do the long sweeping curves with ease and some tempo. However then doing the little paws with those pads was really quite difficult.

It got better as I moved along. I do trace every row...this helps me to familiarise myself with the design and cement that muscle memory of the design, however I can honestly say coming to the end of it I am utterly sick of tracing the same thing over and over again. I do take the paper out as I go along, only leaving the bottom bit in as it has part of the next row on it which is used for alignment. I do trace with the blue water erasable pen...this is to avoid getting any pencil marks or similar onto the quilt. Not that I ever tried to do it with a pencil, but I am just a bit paranoid.

Moving along

I did two rows per day and took my time both with the alignment and the stitching of the rows. I am not going to say this was easy-peasy. At this width (of the quilt and the design itself) it was actually quite hard to do and I definitely have a few wobbles here and there. I used a different thread this time...So Fine (50/3wt) in a brown tone (both in the top and bottom) and I was grateful that this blended in so nicely. Curiously enough, my curves are nice and sweeping, the wobbles usually occurred in the little cat paw, but with this thread this is not that noticeable.

And it's done! Happy to report that my rows were absolutely dead straight as I hit the bottom in line with the edge of my paper row.  Always relieved at that. Both sides are also nice and consistent in the way the design sits...on one or two rows maybe out by about 1/8in but that does not matter at all as the binding will take care of that.

Currently doing the binding. This quilt will go to my daughter who loves everything brown and she is already very excited to have this quilt on her bed. Can honestly say that this linky party is partly the reason for finally getting this quilt done. Putting it on your list week by week adds that subtle pressure to actually do it, so big 'thank you' to the linky party...one UFO conquered!

So, for next week I will need to keep it simple as I there is Christmas planning and shopping to be done. However, I am planning to 

- finish the binding on the cat quilt.

- finish attaching the hanging sleeve to my background filler project.

Joining the To Do Tuesday #52 Linky Party over at Quilt Schmilt.

Karin