Day 4 - "What am I Doing?" Quilt

Well, today was Wednesday - and I had to have it all finished by Friday - ready to go to the recipient’s daughter so she could pack it in her stuff to go on her bus trip.

I got up and dilly dallied around putting off going to the long arm room in spite of the fact of having just a bit let on the quilt because I had had issues the day before with the machine. I was dreading it. Mike saw that I was taking a long time to get down there and I admitted that I was procrastinating because if the machine didn’t work, I was going to have to take it off and haul it up to my Janome upstairs and finish it.

So he went with me. (What a good husband!)

We turned on the machine and the initial estimates appeared good. Whew. I knew I only had about 10 minutes of quilting to do. Maybe even less.

So, after putting it on the setting I wanted, I tested it and it ran - so I went with it. I did finish it all before the machine was beginning to give me problems. But I had it quilted! (Issues with the long arm deserves another post - that isn’t for this one).

So, I took off the machine, saying “Thank you, Lord” for letting me get it done.

I then took it upstairs, trimmed it, then prepared the binding, bound it and was completely finished by 10 am or so.

(I had already cut the binding—and doing a regular binding takes so much less time than a scrappy one with many small pieces.)

I do machine sew bindings on, so that is why I was able to finish so quickly.

I did not put a name on tag on it. I had considered signing my name in the quilting itself, but didn’t. This lady really doesn’t know me - only her daughter does.

I took it downstairs and put it in the washing machine almost immediately and hoped that by 11 am I could have it on the line, drying.

At about 11 am I checked on the washer and it still said 17 min. left. I watched the machine go round and round for a few minutes, all the time still saying 17 minutes left. I decided at that point that the quilt was simply too heavy to spin out properly in my front loader wimpy machine - big for Europe, but compared to what my sister in law in AK has, it’s a small— so I stopped the cycle, took a wet, heavy quilt out of the machine and took it outside to dry. It was almost 100F outside on Wednesday so it was dry within a couple of hours. Because there was so much water in it, it actually was dry at the top within the hour but the bottom part was still damp.

I brought it in after it was dry - hopefully before any birds had time to baptize it with anything and let it sit. I was just so relieved. I needed to get back to my cleaning out rooms to get ready for my son and his wife as I had missed completely doing any work on Monday and Tuesday (the room has looked like a hoarder room for years now!)

Anyway, here are the final pictures I have of the quilt.

 

I was so happy to have it done and quite happy with the quilt. I felt like I did the best I could with what I wanted to do in the time I had. I featured the farm fabrics, which is what I wanted to do - and didn’t worry about piecing blocks like I could have had I planned it much earlier.

 

Thanks so much for coming along with me on this journey.

Have a great day wherever you are reading this.

I’ll tell you how it went when I gave it to Raya and her reaction tomorrow. As I write, I don’t know if she’s made it to Ukraine yet or if her mom has seen it.















Becky Petersen4 Comments