What's on the Long Arm

I've made some changes regarding machine quilting. Sort of a late new year's resolution. (can you believe it's May already!) First, I'm no longer quilting for Quilts of Valor. At least for the next few months.   I have three more donation quilts to complete for the Martha Quilts and then I'm taking a break from doing those as well.  I have one quilt to complete for a friend, and then I'm not quilting for anyone except ---Me!

Last month I cleaned and sorted what I thought were UFO's in my my sewing room. I thought all those rubbermaid boxes had unfinished quilts in them it had been so long since I peeked inside one! Actually, only a few had cut and partially pieced projects. The rest were filled with fabrics, thread and pattern. All ready to be cut. I tend to do that with projects. Collect everything and stuff it in a container.  So maybe they should be called "semi-UFO's".

I finished one of two pretty quilts my quilting buddy, Christy, wanted completed. I used the "Cosmos" Circle Lord template. I love this floral design, especially on quilts with large open blocks like this one Christy pieced.

Yesterday I played around with the free motion foot and some colors of Mettler Poly thread quilting veins in the leaves on a table runner I had planned to finish for our daughter months ago. I had never sat and machine quilted with my Pfaff Quilt Expression machine before. In fact I'm a bit rusty with sitting and machine quilting period, but I didn't want to change thread colors often for the leaves on the long arm and this worked out much better. It was a lot of fun playing! The Pfaff free motioned great! Whatever mistakes there are, it's certainly not the machines fault!

Today I loaded the table runner it onto the long arm.

And while it seems like a smaller quilting project than I normally do, this is going to take some time. The quilting I want to do is a small swirling fill and I've reduced the stitches per inch up to 12 from my regular 10 spi.  I'm loving working on some of my own projects.