Quilting

We got back from our Utah vacation late last Friday. We were there about a week and we had a wonderful, busy time. We met two nieces we hadn't seen before and spent a lot of time with my family and my husband's family. We also saw friends from Kansas that we haven't seen for almost two years; I'm so glad it worked out and we were in Utah the same time as they were. We went to the water park and splash pad and had Gandalfo's and Cafe Rio, and my in-laws made delicious German food too. It was so nice but also exhausting and we were glad to get home and try to get back to normal for a couple weeks.

My mom got a new longarm recently and I quilted my scrappy trips quilt on it.

One big problem--you may have heard that longarm quilters want your quilt back to be 4-6 inches larger than your top on all four sides? Now I know why. I made my quilt back about 4" longer than the top, total, and we didn't load the quilt on the machine so the top would be centered on the back. So my quilt back was too short and now I'm going to have to add another strip of fabric to the quilt back so I can finish up the quilting. I don't think I'll ever make that mistake again. :)

But overall I had fun quilting with the longarm and I do think I want one of my own, one day. It is a lot different from quilting with a domestic table-top sewing machine, because it's a lot easier to move the machine. (And it's way faster too.) I did mostly swirly loops but I tried a few other quilting motifs too (which were not as easy and mostly didn't look as good as my simple loops.)

I am working to finish up Jan's quilt as well. Today I finished quilting the inner border and started the outer border. I'm doing a double feather again, with a row of echo stitching around it to help fill in the space.