I've now attached the laser to the machine, shifted the controls to the rear of the carriage, and am trying to upskill on driving the machine using a pantograph. I've started on a fairly easy one and loaded a practice quilt sandwich. The pantograph is a long paper pattern that lays along the table to the rear of the machine. The laser point represents the machine needle, and the skill is to smoothly drive the laser light along the paper pattern so that the machine stitches out a duplicate of the pattern. Of course, any accidental jogs, wavers, hesitations etc all show up in the stitching as well.
The pattern laid along the rear of the machine.
The paper pattern
the resulting stitched pattern.
I'm going to practice a bit more then load quilt number three which will be the Cosy Afternoon BOM I made a few years ago.
When I was handstitching down the binding on quilt number one, the cat thought it made a pretty good hammock.
In the sewing room, I spent some time on my day off getting further quilts ready for the frame. By my count I have 14 tops waiting. Some of them can only be basted on the frame and will have to be quilted on the sit down machine. One really needs to be hand quilted. One wall hanging I've already pinned up into a sandwich to quilt at the sit down machine. I also sewed together three backings ready for their respective quilts, and I've started stitching down some fusible applique on a quilt I made about 10 or 12 years ago. There is a lot of fusible applique on it and I never felt like doing it so it's never been quilted. I really want to clear the decks on all these old projects and get them finished and out of the sewing room.
Also on my day off, I had a go at creating pavement in front of the hairdressing salon using paperclay. The pavement came out alright, I'm not so happy about the 'tiles' in front of the door but I'll keep tinkering with them.
We had a nice day out today over to Weedon Bec where the Royal Ordnance Depot was having an open day. This is a massive complex built in Napoleonic times to house ordnance and supplies in a central location away from the dangers of a possible invasion. It was connected by a spur canal to a nearby bigger canal and later to the railway, and was in use up until the mid-sixties. Nowadays it houses a mix of small businesses and we visited a fun bookstore and an antiques store. For the open day they also had a lot of craft stalls, food stalls, vintage vehicles, military re-enactors etc.
Afterward we headed over to The Village Antiques Market in Weedon which we have visited before, and picked up a chest of drawers for DS's room and a nice oak bookcase for the hallway. 'Brown' furniture is still so cheap because nobody seems to want it, but we love buying solid wood antiques for the same or less than you would pay for flimsy modern chipboard furniture.
That's about it this week. I've done a bit more on the Bucks Point lace edging and I've been using my Lapman frame to work on my ancient cross stitch picture. I looked up online when I should pick pears from our pear tree and it said that they are ready to pick when they part easily from the stem when lifted to a horizontal position. So I went out to pick some pears and it turned out almost all of them were ready to pick so now we've got pears coming out our ears. I've made one pear pie already and I'm sure there will be more in my future. Our strawberry plants are still producing about a handful of berries a week which is nice. The apple tree is absolutely laden but I don't think the apples will be ripe for some time yet. Some of the branches were actually hanging down to the ground and crushing my bedding plants so I've improvised some supports to keep the apples up in the air.
1 comment:
Glad you're making progress with your frame. I haven't conquered pantos yet.
My daughters cat uses my quilting things as a hammock. She's starting to get more attached to the rest of us so she spends less time on the hammock!
Thanks for blogging. I love catching up with you on here.
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