Oops, that’s never happened before

I finished quilting the center of the baby quilt this morning.  All that’s left is the borders and binding.  I can likely knock that out this weekend. 

I snipped the threads this morning and took it over to the sofa so I could look at it and I admired the front and I flipped it over to check out the back and there was this piece of fabric stuck to it.

I grabbed it, to pull it off, and it was stuck.  It was quilted in. 

Oh, NO, Mr. Quilt!

My quilting surface shares space with my cutting surface.  I need lots of room on the back side of my machine to hold quilts when I’m machine quilting, so I backed it up to the cutting board and the table it sits on.  And, at some point, the quilt picked up a scrap and it stuck all the way through the quilting process. 

It wasn’t any trouble to remove.  I cut it along the quilting lines without cutting the quilting thread and then unraveled it from under the thread (is that unraveled, or raveled??)  Anyway, the warp and welt threads separated and it came right out. 

I also wanted to point out that I say all the time that I can’t do random.  I said it just this week with the Easy Street mystery.  But, this quilt is all about the random.

The fabrics were picked at random (and in a couple places, that shows).  And, the quilting is totally random.  It’s like a spiky stipple that makes me think of wind and it is all over this quilt, heading here and then there, twisting and turning over the surface of the quilt.  And it is only curves and points that make it.  I use this a lot on small donated or gift quilts.  It leaves the quilt soft and loose.  For the first time in all the years that I’ve been working this design, I didn’t cross my thread even once and there is only one starting spot and one ending spot where the quilting runs off the edge of the quilt.  In the past, I’ve quilted and accidentally left empty spots that I had to go back and fill and those created extra starts and stops, but not this time.  I filled it evenly in the first pass across.  If the baby ever wants to, he can use his finger to follow that thread from one corner to the other.

Next are some straight lines along the borders.

I bought myself another christmas present this morning.  Wee, me!  It was something I’ve wanted for years and wouldn’t give myself and today, I found it at the right price and I went for it.  It’s not the kind of thing that I could have suggested to Rob because he would have overpaid for it, to get me a really nicer one than I needed. 

What was my totally useless gift to myself?  My bit of extravagance?  Well, you’re just going to have to wait til Christmas to find out.  Just because I bought it for me doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a christmas surprise.

Be well, have a great day, tomorrow is clue three in the Easy Street mystery.  Today, my work group is having our holiday lunch, so I dressed a bit nicer than normal.  After lunch, I get the rest of the afternoon off, which is the real gift from the company.  I’m going to use it to trim flying geese units.

Lane