Bloom Bloom Pow Update – At last!

Happy days…my sewing machine has returned!

Supposedly there was nothing wrong with it, but seriously there was and strangely they sent a new lead and foot pedal and now it works fine…hmm I wonder why?!

Nevermind, I don’t care as long as it’s back and not having a fit every 5 seconds.

So this means the Bloom Bloom Pow is back on track.

Last time I wrote about the quilt I had finished the top and that was it. So since then it has been a bit of a stressful task to get the Bloom Bloom on its way to being finished.

Here’s what’s been going on…..

1. Sewing the back

Didn’t really know what to do for this, but felt it was best to keep it simple. So I decided to make a lovely (if I do say so myself!) rainbow strip of all the colours as a focal point and then surround them with greys.

Initially I had thought about using grey instead of white for the background on the front but wasn’t sure if the colours would pop so much and ended up sticking with white. However, I knew white was not going to be an option for the backing…no way! Miss Suki puss has already claimed it for her own as has little O and tiny hands and paws do not mix well with white.

‘scuse my scruffy chin, just been drinking my water!

2. Ironing

Boooo!

I gave up on this in the end there was no way it was going to happen. As fast as I was ironing everything else was getting creased…ironing ….creasing…ironing…creasing…argh, it would have to do.

3. Spray Basting

Not as bad as expected this bit. I had visions of big wrinkles working their way across the quilt and a great sticky mess, but no it was all quite civilised and the quilt behaved very well. Even better I needn’t have worried about the creases because they soon went once flattened, phew!

4. Quilting

Now this is where I’m up to at the moment. I must say that this bit has not been as easy as I thought, who knew sewing a straight line could be sooo difficult. This was my first line…

Yup, pretty nasty and typical that it would be on the dark grey. Bad white stitching on dark grey…looking good!

I had to unpick this baby.

Now, you’ll laugh at how long this took….no really you will…I, however, definitely wasn’t.

2 hours!

Yes, that’s right, 2 hours it took me to unpick two rows of stitches. Happy I was not! The main problem was the length of the stitches, they were really short. This was because of a couple of things – the default stitch length is short on my machine AND I forgot to lengthen it (oops), plus my poor quilt control.

In the end it was taking me so long to unpick that I actually went in search of advice and found what I was looking for on Lily’s quilts ….don’t bother to unpick. I will remember that for next time!

So after that the quilting got better. There were a couple of other incidents, but nothing to write home about.

But still quite wonky….see….

Up to now I’m half way through and hopefully will have finished by tonight.

Have finished it all now, pics to follow soon! Here’s a half finished weird colour one for now…

Next step…bias binding!

Only one problem…I remembered at about 16:00 this aft that I don’t have any fabric for this and it’s bank hol this weekend so not sure it will arrive until Tuesday which is a bit sad, but finger’s crossed it will get here.

xxxxx xxxxx (that’s all my fingers…and more!)

Linking up with…Melissa at Sew BitterSweet Designs for Let’s Get Acquainted.