Lucie The Happy Quilter's Blog

I feel like I’ve arrived by sliding in on the seat of my pants this evening. It’s been another rather busy day. I started the day by loading this quilt into the longarm quilting system. I haven’t decided how to quilt it yet. I’m hoping it will come to me before I plan on hitting the go button in the morning. I can see simple feathers on this one. Perhaps I will have a progress report for you tomorrow …….

I had a couple of meetings this morning. Ann collected her hedgehog quilt and Kathryn popped up from Middlesborough to drop off her Bali Pop quilt. I meet some really interesting and loads of like-minded people in the course of my longarm quilting. I’m a real Chatty Cathy when it comes down to it. And when people step into my sewing room and see my longarm quilting system most often the word that comes out of their mouth is wow. My system is a major piece of kit. And once you see past it you will find quilts on just about every wall and fabrics and related tools on every surface. In general the room looks like a mad professor has taken over and made it his own! Well today after my meetings I set to and tidied one little surface but as usual I got distracted……. While I tidy I find things that I have been looking for or start looking at a book that I managed to unearth from a pile of stuff that needs putting away! Never mind tomorrow is another day. However I did manage to make a little corner look a little tidier before I decided to work on chain piecing my Dresden blades…….

Now little by little I will be clipping the points, turning them right side out and pressing them ready for joining them to form the actual Dresden Plate which I will eventually applique onto black fabric. Making Dresden Plates must be one of the easiest techniques to learn but it looks a lot more complicated than it is. And it does look great when it’s well quilted. I’m quite looking forward to getting a little further ahead on this project.

Something else I wanted to do since last week was to label my Blueberry Brick quilt. My lovely quilt will survive long after I’ve gone and now that it has a label whoever the next caretaker might be there is a record of who pieced and quilted it and where and what year. And now I feel free to enjoy it……

While tidying I came across a few sets of templates, one for the Dresden Plate that I am currently working, the next set was for the Hanging Lanterns for which I pieced a sample a couple of weeks ago and the last set was for my Japanese Folded Patchwork bag. The Dresden Plate and the Japanese Folded Patchwork are templates that I use over and over again so I really want to preserve them. I’ve also been asked over and over again for templates by interested parties so they’re worth filing away neatly. Well I found the perfect way of filing them away. I purchased a couple of A5 binders and zip pockets for the smaller templates and for the larger templates like the Japanese Folded Patchwork I purchased inexpensive plastic snap button pouches which I punched holes into and popped into a larger binder long with my instructions. It’s a great way of keeping everything well organised. Now if I could just find a place to store the binders this theory would work really well……

Well it’s been yet another busy day for this happy longarm quilter. It looks like the rest of the week might be a little calmer although I do have quite a lot to get thru before the weekend.

So for this evening, this very happy longarm quilter will be doing a little more hand quilting and perhaps a little quilt marking of the next stage. Whatever you may be doing this evening, I hope you’re working on something you enjoy. Until you read me again,

Happy stitching. ♥ ♥