Simple Saturday

It was an easy day today. There was a little time for embroidery this morning before I needed to take off to meet up with my friend, Carla, at the Portland Farmer's Market. We had a good time together and a nice lunch. It has been a while since I've been to the farmer's market. I bought a half flat of strawberries, a pound of cherries, and two jars of kimchee (which I love). Oh yes, and a couple of tomatoes. It's early for the tomatoes, and these were hydroponically grown in a greenhouse. At least they're picked ripe.

After that, I stopped to get some more bird seed. The birds are eating us out of house and home right now. Then I went to my local Pfaff dealer and picked up the open-toed free motion foot for Pfelicity. Since I've never tried free motion quilting with anything other than my Bernina Stitch Regulator, I was curious to see how this would work. The foot came with absolutely no instruction other than the picture on the box, and it took me a while to figure out how to install it. Once I had that accomplished, I took some stitches on a test quilt sandwich:

And look at that! Nice and even, with good tension. I was very pleased to see that it really was no different from free motion quilting with the stitch regulator. It's unlikely that I would actually use Pfelicity for free motion quilting if I have the choice to use Big Bertha, simply because Big Bertha has a nice size throat space. Nevertheless, Pfelicity has a pretty good sized throat space for her size, and I could certainly quilt small quilts if I needed to. It's good to have a choice.

I'm told that Big Bertha's new bobbin case will be in on Monday, and I'm also hopeful that will fix her problem. If not, she still may need to go back for repair. I've just been holding onto her here at home until I could test out the bobbin case theory. If it doesn't work, then I do plan to use Pfelicity to quilt the Blooming Sunflower and some of the other small quilts I have sitting around. All of that will have to wait for next week, however, because I'm still in the process of completing the Good Morning quilt top.

Today I finished up the rest of the rows and it is all sewn together except for the seam between rows four and five (the top and bottom half of the quilt). 

Hopefully, I'll be able to finish up this top tomorrow. It still needs a narrow white border in addition to completing the middle seam.

Originally, I thought I might send this off to a long arm quilter, but I think it's a good candidate for simple straight line quilting. It's a little too wide for me to sandwich on my ping pong table, but I'm considering trying out Sharon Schamber's method of using two boards. Here's her YouTube demonstration:

If you can't see the video, then click right here. The video is in two parts, and you can find the second part, right here. Essentially, one uses two boards in the same way a quilt sandwich is rolled up on a long arm machine. If I can do that, then I'll quilt it myself.

So that's about it from me today. Our weather has been sort of iffy...cloudy and cool with a few showers. Tomorrow is Matthew's graduation ceremony, and it is supposed to be outdoors. If the weather is dry, it will be nice to have it a little cooler. Hopefully, we won't get rained on.

What did you do today?