My New Best Friend

Yes, my new friend may be cold and made of metal and eats thread, and I do have to pay money to spend time with it, but it was worth every penny and I'll do it again.

Other titles for this post are:

My Very First Time

Quilting Makes Me Happy

I'm Sew Into This

If I had a bucket list I suppose this would be one of the items on my list and I can now cross it off as having done it.

All those years of classes at the Expo, all those expensive spools of thread, it has finally all come together for me.

We have a new quilt shop in downtown Kent called Running Stitch Fabrics. They have a long arm quilting machine. A couple of weeks ago I took the four hour class to learn how to use it.

Last Saturday I had signed up to rent the machine for 4 hours. The quilt top is one that my sister helped me make years ago. It is intended for the futon in the spare bedroom. Since it is for myself I figured it would be a good practice quilt.

I prepped the backing the night before. Saturday morning I was at the shop bright and early before she even opened. Alice helped me set the quilt up on the frame and got the machine going. For the first little bit I had some problems with my thread breaking. A call to the teacher fixed that and I was off and quilting.

I did a large stipple on the borders, a squiggly line with hearts in the sashing and a design inside each block. All in all I was there for 5 hours.

It was tons of fun and I had lots of comments and questions from many of the store's customers. It was great to see the store busy on a Saturday.

Now I am working on attaching the binding and then the quilt will be finished. I have the machine reserved in a few more weeks. I figure having a deadline will get me to finish up a couple of quilt tops so they'll be ready to quilt.

I'm hooked.