a finished bird

Frederick has a head and finished body! While not totally pleased with his progress I did manage to stitch at least six hours over the past week. Which is pretty good these days. I'd like to get in at least double that amount. Maybe soon. :-)

This is the first quilt finished with the long arm machine! I've had this top around for several years now and it's finally complete. It's a Ricky Tims' design from a book called Convergence Quilts. I went through a phase a couple of years ago where I felt I needed to do stuff out of my comfort zone. And everything about this is out of my comfort zone! The style, the colors, everything! I had to do a freehand meander since the autobot on the long arm isn't working. My sister had to take a few parts in for service so no more quilting for a couple of weeks. Hopefully we will be able to get some of the advanced functions working at that point. Her long arm is a totally automated machine. We should be able to just select a quilt design and tell the machine to go. While I want to learn how to do it all freehand, until that time comes it will be nice must to hit go and watch it work. :-) Since I have a backlog of at least 20 tops and my sister has about the same amount, I'm looking forward to getting caught up. All for the price of batting and thread. No more paying someone else to finish my work! And I'll have total control which is the number one thing I hated about sending my quilt top to be finished by someone else. While I really liked the work my quilters did, not having any say in what they did was frustrating.

Have a great weekend! I'm finally starting on the bedroom tomorrow. Yeah! Now I need to find an extra thousand dollars for my hardwood floor. :-( That's going to be tough right now.