It’s grey and dreary outside today – which makes it a perfect stay home and sew and knit day. I have switched off the feeling guilty about the housework side of my brain. I’ve earned this day.

UFO number one were the Retro Rib Socks that I’ve been working on recently. Tick off the list. Done.

I won’t bore you again by telling you that I love these socks in all their understatedness. But I do. All details of pattern and yarn have been covered in recent posts, so I won’t go there again.

UFO number two is the Martinique quilt top that I started way back when – March? April? I don’t like basting quilts very much and I had certainly forgotten how long it takes and how backbreaking it is to baste a quilt top as big as this. It took me a pretty significant chunk of the morning.

I hummed and hawed a little about how to machine quilt this and started out with a nice little bit of freehand quilting in the peach border. Feeling as though I was on a roll I started quilting in the ditch around the nine patches and doing parallel lines in the outer border.

And I absolutely hated it. This is not the world’s most fascinating quilt to start with and that quilting didn’t help one bit. Not one teeny tiny bit. And the long (wobbly) lines in the outer border just proved to the world that Helen is incapable of quilting in a straight line.

So out it all came. Thankfully at least the timing was right and there was something interesting to listen to on the radio.

Then my sewing machine – long overdue for a service, poor thing – started playing up. Not today, please not today…..Today is my make some progress day…I neeeeeed my machine to be a good little machine.

I found ways to manipulate around the little quirks that seemed to have developed overnight – like not immobilizing the needle when I’m trying to fill the bottom spool – and now I’ve embarked on my eternal fallback machine quilting strategy. Freehand stippling. I can do this. It isn’t the look I thought I would go for with this quilt, but I can do it, it looks OK and the quilt is being quilted. Which, right at this point in time, is the main thing. Slowly but surely I am now plodding along. More anon.

Did I say that I was supposed to be enjoying myself today?

Mmmm

Helen

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Knitting, Quilting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.