Staying on track and the World Series

Wow, what a Sunday.  I am happy to say that I stayed on track this weekend ... good for me ... and wahoo!  Yesterday I told you that I was going to quilt two quilts today, and I did.  I'm so proud of myself!  I started the day off by reading the paper and then watching the Charger game.  Oh, that game was pretty awful ... I should have just watched the first half!  Then I ran upstairs to my sewing room and sewed two backs together to go on the longarm machine.

I read on a yahoo group that I belong to that if you have a couple of small quilts, you can sew the backs together, and then when you load them, you only have to load them one time.  It is genius!  The pink quilt is a baby quilt and it was about 44 x 44.  The other quilt was about 54 x 64.  I just made sure both of the backs were square, and then sewed the short side together.  I loaded them so the pink quilt came up first.  It was so darn easy and it worked great.

The first quilt up was the pink baby quilt and my friend Karen wanted an all over pattern that was pretty largely spaced. 

I knew the panto that I used yesterday would work great.  She also wanted a bright pink thread.  Luckily when I was doing my longarm training in Utah, I bought several "out of my box" colors of Glide thread, and one of them is a really pretty, bright pink ... perfect!  The first thing I had to do was figure out the spacing on the pantograph.  You don't want to start with a row all pretty and perfect, and then end in the middle of a row.  I haven't done this before, but I mathematically figured out how wide each row was, then figured out the space I had in the quilt to work with, did a little bit of multiplication and subtraction, and it came out quite well.  I haven't had a chance to trim the quilt up, so I'll show you a picture of it tomorrow.  Next up was Judy's quilt ... she wanted the same design I did on her last quilt, an all over cabbage flower.  I decided to use some of my new Glide thread ... you remember?  One of my 6 new natural/brown colors!!  LOL!!!  I used a color called light tan ... it worked great on her quilt. 

The only problem was about 1/3 of the way through, I decided the tension on the back of the quilt was looking a little tight.  I decided to loosen it and then I created a problem.  I hate when this happens ... you do one little thing, and then you create problems.  Then the tension looked bad, no matter what I did.  So I decided to change the needle ... well then it sounded like it was clunking when it was sewing.  I got my flashlight and crawled underneath the machine and checked the back ... the tension looked okay. So I kept on going.  Eventually that clunking went away.  I have no idea what it was.  The quilt looks good, and I'm glad I got it done.  Tomorrow I'll do another quilt!  My stack is starting to go down ... yay!  I didn't get a chance to trim this quilt either, so tomorrow when I do that, I'll post a better picture.

How was your Sunday?  I finished my evening by watching the World Series.  I'm rooting for St. Louis, well it was just not their day today.  That's okay because everyone wants to see a good series, right?  I sure hate it when it's a blowout and you've waited and gotten all excited about it, and then one team totally outpowers the other.  Today the score was Texas 4, St. Louis 0.  The series is tied 2-2.  Looking forward to a good game tomorrow and a St. Louis win!