Progress continues

Sunday I had a peaceful day of rest after church. Working in the nursery in the morning was not restful with more babies than our quota. They were all pretty well behaved, so it worked out with the four of us caring for them. I think I changed diapers on seven of the eight, but the babies didn't all sleep. 8-) Our motto is, "they shall all be changed, but they shall not all sleep."

I spent some time Sunday evening watching videos on YouTube about machine quilting. Several of them had great tips. I was surprised at the abundance of quilting clips on there.

I put the walking foot on Big Ellie and went to work yesterday afternoon with the quilt-in-the ditch part of my quilting. I had a few false starts until I got everything working together. One tip I saw on YouTube that I have trouble remembering is to pull the bobbin thread to the top before I start stitching to avoid the dreaded “thread nests.” Another tip said to use YLI invisible thread, which I fortunately had in stock. Apparently I used it in another project somewhere sometime. At least with the invisible thread it isn’t as noticeable when I don’t stay in the ditch.

I discovered that I have an echo foot in my box of presser feet and I’ll play with it a bit to see how it goes. It may work on the embroidered blocks. I also thought that I might just do a curve in the corners of the blocks a couple of times to anchor the sandwich. I even searched through my embroidery designs last night to see if I had any little redwork designs that I could embroider in the corners, without success except for a freebie little bulldog head from Oma’s Place. I don’t think that would look too hot in my Christmas and Fall blocks though. At least I’m making good progress now and am happy with the way it is turning out. Without too many roadblocks, I may just get this thing finished and in the mail by the end of the week.

Here are two pictures of my progress.