A Bit Thick

There are often times when I wonder what I was thinking…

I sewed all of the blocks together on the zany Aurora quilt and they matched up almost perfectly, except for two of the over-sized quarter square blocks that I seem to have trimmed oddly. I wanted to use a double layer of wadding to get a high loft and normally I would use a layer of cotton and a layer of wool. However, I had been put off wool after I had a batch of wadding that was ‘beardy”. I just knew that it ought to be cotton so it would be easy to block while damp so it would hang square. I could easily have used two sensible, thin layers of cotton but I chose to double-up with extra dense Warm Plush. 

I started dutifully stitching-in-the-ditch with invisible thread and immediately broke a needle. I broke a whole packet of needles and was quilting like a nervous wreck, holding my breath the entire time. It was good job I was wearing specs as the needle tips were shattering and pinging randomly. Fed up with seeing nasty little needle rips in the quilt, I finished off the SID on the domestic machine, sewing very slowly. 

I have now put the quilt back onto the Longarm and raised the hopping foot which I HOPE will make a difference so I can tackle some free-motion quilting. Currently, my show quilt for 2015 looks like a baggy, beginner’s project! 

Another bad habit that I have is trawling for junk on Ebay and Gumtree. I managed not buy a tiny camper van or sweet shop scales but I did go and see a bargain oil-fired Rayburn cooker. It will probably be 100 years before my husband agrees to have it installed in our kitchen and I have a nasty feeling that it may be too small to heat all of the radiators but I daresay I can always trade it in for a bigger model when the time comes. Meanwhile, it can replace the obsolete chest freezer in the garage as a place to store camping gear!