So I know I posted a while back about a finished quilt top, but not the actual finished quilt. I did finish it months ago, but it’s waiting for a special someone to arrive into the world, and that special someone is due to arrive TOMORROW! So stay tuned!

In the meantime, I’ve finished a second one! This one is another gift and for someone I doubt reads my blog, and dammit I’m busting at the seams with my new found addiction and how pleased I am with the results, so surprise be damned.

So this is the very same pattern as the first quilt I made (by Elizabeth Hartman of Oh Fransson!), but a different set of fabrics. This is made predominantly of Cloud9 Fabrics My Happy Garden, which is so adorable it defies all measures of cuteness. Fabric like this is a big part of why I’m so addicted to this new craft, even though I’ve barely just started.

The fabric in the square below however is from the Textile Museum of Canada’s annual ‘More than Just a Yardage Sale’ from last year. The brown in it picks up the gray-browns from the Cloud9 fabric, and the solid blue and binding is Kona fabric that I ordered from Sew-Sisters (BTW they are having a free shipping event until August 22 — I <3 their free shipping events!).

I am so pleased with how this turned out. Now I had my fair share of problems with the quilting, again, but it was definitely better than the first time I tried it. I suspect that this is due to a combination of nit-picky tension on my machine which continues to totally baffle me (not to mention I swear it adjusts itself on the fly) and a general dislike the machine has for this  kind of work. It is after all a 40-some-odd-year-old Singer Stylist. But I refuse to give up on it yet, in part because I need to win the lottery before I can afford the Ferrari of the sewing machine world, the Bernina 830 (it goes for about $12,000 USD). I can dream, can’t I?

I’ve been rest assured by several repair shops that my Singer is a keeper and running just fine, but I suspect something has gone wonky with the tension controls. Then there is the matter of the sensitivity of the foot pedal, which resists moving until it goes off like a shot, and this seems especially worse after I’ve been using it for a while and the pedal heats up. Chris and I took it apart tonight to have a look-see, and it has a very old-school ceramic resister tube with metal that runs through the middle, and Chris suspects that metal is broken in the middle, but the machine still works. I wonder if the resister can be replaced. Anyone had experience with such things?

If anyone has any tips for machines or classes of machines (older and newer) that are especially well suited to machine quilting, I’m all ears.

Because I am so hooked on this.