Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Frustrations And Solutions


I have been doing a lot of behind the scenes designing and sewing. I wanted to put this one out there because I have had so many things going on that I need to give myself some pressure to wrap it up. This is one new project that I will be teaching on-line at CraftEdu. It's called Chirp! and I hope that you like it as much as I loved designing it.


We all love beautiful quilts and seeing the end result, right? I think that we should share our little boo-boos too. We need to learn from each other. I thought that you'd love to hear about my experience with quilting this little baby. Before I begin though, I need to tell you that I am a "paid" supporter of Aurifil Threads.  Having said that, I can tell you how much I love Aurifil thread and that my love of this thread did not come from being a supporter of their thread. Instead, I got to realize this first hand.


I design with many, many different colors in each quilt. I like to add many different textures, layers, shades all at once to make my designs pop. As a result, I often [perhaps "exclusively"] use monofilament thread to quilt my quilts. I have been burning through my thread stash for the bobbin thread. Different brands and I won't name them because I still think that they're good threads. I hadn't tried Aurifil in any great capacity because of availability and my huge stash of other threads.

Well, I was working on Chirp! at a weird, late hour of the night and I got the center background portion all quilted with the leafy vine only to really realize that the bobbin thread was pulling up too much for my liking. I had adjusted everything but I could still see the bobbin thread here and there. I took my seam ripper and ripped out all of the quilting. Crazy, I know. Did I tell you that I'm anal when it comes to these things? [One day I will tell you the story about "Believe" and how I appliqued one side panel in two days.] Or, it could have been because I was doing this in the wee hours of the morning.

Anyhoo, I popped in Aurifil Mako 50wt. #5015 [happens to be one of my favorite colors, by the way] in the bobbin and on top. It was like butter. It made me glide along effortlessly while quilting those vines and leaves. It felt incredibly light and smooth. The resulting quilting was nicely textured and not too overbearing. Awesome.

xo, L