This past Saturday morning, I went to Patti’s and had a lesson on the long arm.  If you haven’t used/seen/heard of a long arm, it is a huge sewing machine on rails that allows you to quilt.  You use it by standing and basically driving the machine across the quilt.  It’s a bit like drawing with your whole torso.  And it’s FAST.  I quilted these two in about 5 and a half hours, and that included a break to go to JoAnn to buy backing for the second quilt and eat lunch at Burger King.

Guys, that first quilt, the one that was so katty-wompus that I doubted whether to even quilt it?  Yeah, it’s quilted, and I totally won the “can this quilt be saved?” game.  It’s the first one you see below.  The second is the jelly roll race quilt.

I’ve left these photos large  so you can see the detail.  You may notice that I broke all the rules in quilt number one.  The quilting is not evenly spaced. I crossed over my own quilting lines with wild abandon.  And.  I LOVE the way it turned out. Love it. I like the second quilt, too, but this crazily quilted first one? Love.

For this one, I tried to use the same basic quilting motion and be more regular. I avoided crossing the lines for the most part, but made a few because I like the way they look. As I was quilting this one, I realized the error in my thinking that the backs of quilts are just additional space for piecing. No. The backs of quilts are there so you can see the quilting, which gets lost on the fronts. I’m not going to be backing my quilts with quilts. I’m going to back them with backing and quilt the crazy random loopy life out of them in somewhat visible thread and I am going to enjoy driving that long arm all over my quilts!

I took some time this morning to decide other things, like what I want to teach the kids this summer and how far I need to get on various crafty goals to feel caught up. It’s a lengthy list for my 12-20 days off. We’ll see how it goes.

And my final decision for the morning was…I’m breaking up with this scarf over the weekend. I’m going to finish it or be finished with it, because I have been knitting on it for 3 months, it’s over 10 feet long, and I am so over garter stitch right now! I’m over 4/5ths done, and well into the home stretch. I think I can make it. But regardless, sometime during this weekend’s crafting retreat, I’m going to be done with this piece.