aarrrrgggghhhhh….. to rip or not to rip????

The new I Spy baby quilt is simply NOT working out for me. I bought this softbook panel a long time ago. But decided that it was too big and flimsy to be a good soft book, although it would probably make a great I Spy quilt instead.

I took a long time cutting and piecing the quilt, and another good few months before I sandwiched the quilt. I got the quilting done ONLY because I needed to free up some space in my WIP drawer. So, its a ‘difficult’ quilt for me since the start.

Benji loves the quilt and had a great time reading the text and ‘spying’ the images. But he declared it as ‘TOO SMALL’ for his bed. My son loves big quilts that have generous overhang. Sigh…

The ultimate blow was when I realised that the binding was a real hot mess – fabric is from Sevenberry – and even after 5 rounds of Synthrapol treatment, the binding could not be saved (although I got the reds from the main quilt out).

Now, I’m wondering if I should simply rip out the binding or leave it as-is???

Chain piecing blooper

I’m a fan of chain piecing. It is quick, thread saving and also saves me the hassle of trimming/tossing those long tails of threads.

This week, I resuscitated a 2.5 year-old WIP that has all the pieces prepped and all ready to go. So I sat down to start working on the 1st step that called for 120 small blocks. I was feeding the patches almost brainlessly for about 30 mins and I thought: “The machine sounds a little weird. Need to put some oil when I reload the bobbin”. And then I stood up to stretch my legs and admire the long chain behind to machine to find that… there’s NO chain! I was probably ‘air-sewing’ for the past 10 mins or so, pushing patches through the footer when I had already ran out of bobbin thread!

ARGH. I cleaned out the machine, fitted in a loaded bobbin and said Good Night. The next evening, I started over again and took time to glance BEHIND the footer once in a while. 😉

Do you know the Bernina 820 has a great bobbin warning feature that tells you that you are running low on your bobbin thread. And that each jumbo bobbin has a capacity about 40% more than the normal ones.