I'm back!

It has been way to long since I have posted anything here so let me catch up! First here is a picture of my new sewing chair. WOW what a difference this make! It is comfortable, has back support and wheels to roll around!  I also bought a stand up OTTLITE. Things are bright now. I can see colors of fabric even after dark. 

Above is my OTTLITE iluminating Barbara's quilt!  I got the outside border on and now I need to put the back together.  I promise Barbara I will finish it soon! 

Saturday late afternoon, I went to Lowes to purchase the 1" metal conduit needed for my new toy, the Flynn Quilt system I had purchased a month ago. (They say the PVC conduit is too flexible.) It came with rods 48" long but most quilts I do are wider than that. They only had 10ft lengths so I got "Wilbur" (my new friend at Lowes) to cut them to 7ft lengths. I figure go ahead and get the 7ft just in case I have a large quilt sometime. Big Mistake! Way to long and to heavy to work with. Word of advise to anyone, you need a large table and alot of open space to use the Flynn system with a large quilt!

It seemed like it took forever to get everyone thing set up and ready to put the quilt on the frame.

At least that is done for next time. The only thing I don't care about with the way they say to attached your quilt, it the time it takes. They recommend to baste your back and top to the leader strips on the rods. I know this gives you more strength in the tension but I think I'll try pinning next time. I just need to use flat head pins to take up less space.

Once I finally got everything together and loaded ready to quilt, it worked really well. Except..
for the fact I was working on a table about 50" long and using rods 84" long! The PVC pipes used to balance the rods on kept falling off the table because I would forget to move them down! I did finally manage to get three rows quilted across. I did curly-q's in top border, I did an up and down boxey thing in the inside border and did stippling in the one row on the main quilt design.

It looks ok for a first timer! (I think) There are several swirls and that are not to swirly, more like jerky! I probably should have really practiced a good bit before starting on Lauren's quilt. But I wanted to get started! I have a hard time deciding what design would look good on each quilt. Diagonals and in the ditch work well for me, as I don't have to think to hard. but they do get boring! Hopefully tonight I can get more done and almost finished. I will definitely cut the rods down to about 70"

Today is Wednesday and I finished Lauren's quilt !YEA well almost finished, I just have to put the binding on. No biggie.  The more I used the Flynn system the better I got at it. Not perfect but better.  It sure did save a lot of time verus doing it on my machine by hand feeding it through. 

I bought 4 new pieces of fabric to piece around the animal pictures on Alan's quilt.  I bought some clearance fabric from Connecting Threads website.  So now I have about 30 different 1/2 yard pieces of matching fabrics.  Not sure what I am going to do but can't wait to get started on a new project. BUT I must finish many of my unfinished quilts first.