Moving On

Mike's final day at the track was yesterday. He drove the cars...got the t-shirt. He's a graduate now.

Here's a close-up of the certificate so you can see what it says. He's a happy guy.

He even got a sticker for his Corvette back home. Whoa.

For his final day on the track, I spent the day sewing. I decided to set things up a little differently. It worked better for the foot pedal and the cords, and it was easier to access my cutting mat this way. The table is sturdy enough, but not particularly stable, and so I use a non-skid sheet under the sewing machine to keep it from bouncing around too much.

The newest Solstice Challenge block was out, and so I pulled out the kit of fabrics I'd brought along for. The Corvette fabric has been in my stash for years, and I've never done anything with it. This seemed like a perfect opportunity. Since I didn't know what the block would look like, or indeed, even how large it was, I brought lots of choices.

The block is called "Weather Vane" and, for once, it was appropriate for my fabric. It took most of the day to make the block because of some cutting errors. At one point, I feared I'd mis-cut myself into not having enough fabric, but I worked it out. The block ends up at 24 inches, so it's fairly large. This is my block to commemorate Mike's time at the track this week.

After that, I got to work sandwiching my quilt for the quilt-along and setting up the machine to do the stabilizing quilting. If, like me, you've never done "stabilizer quilting," you can read what this step entails here at The Inbox Jaunt. I'm using this "Pretty in Pink" colored thread from Isacord. I'm not sure how I ended up with several spools of Isacord, but I'm experimenting to see if the expense of these threads is worth it. This is a good color for my quilt.

I brought a piece of scrap batting that turned out to be just a little bit shy. I'll just cut my top and bottom borders to make it work after I have the quilting finished. The only thing I did today was to stitch in the ditch on the horizontal seams and the vertical seams. Lori Kennedy was advising a walking foot for this, but Pfelicity has a dual feed, and so I just used a quarter-inch foot. It worked fine.

Here's how it looks from the back. 

From here, she suggested doing Cindy Needham's method of ESS (Every Stinking Seam) and then proceeded to do it on her blog. To do that, I would need to set up the machine for free motion quilting, and I was kind of tired of sewing for the day. I quit where I was. I still might go back and do ESS. We'll see. 

From here, we're heading to the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. Whether I can blog from there is anybody's guess. It always depends on whether I can get internet access. If you don't hear from me for a few days, you'll know the internet failed me.