The Process Of Going To Bed

So, the little fellow whom I'm making the soccer quilt for has a birthday coming up soon. Therefore it was time... time to get this quilt done and get the quilt to him, especially since his family also just put their house up for sale and will move a 15-hour drive away. So I plonked myself on the couch yesterday evening and finished stitching on the soccerball. Don't know if it just looks wonky on the photo, I thought it looked pretty round yesterday...


I zoomed right along and pinned the whole quilt. Now, I'm not really happy with the top, it's totally empty, and I think I might add some applique, but to be honest, I don't want to make this quilt a year-long project, and I wonder if the little guy will just think it's a cool soccer quilt, anyway? Just because the quilt doesn't satisfy my grown-up feminine aesthetic doesn't mean a kid won't like it, right? I'm thinking about maybe adding a 3 or 4 curved strips to add some flying motion to the ball, you know, like you see in cartoons. But the coolest thing would be a person on the lawn of course, a main player so to say. Oh, but will I get this done on time?


[Wow, I just looked at this entry on my page, and when you scroll medium-speed up and down the soccerfield and soccerball-sky fabric have this really weird effect of coming at me. That indicates to me that it's a bit too busy, so maybe a large appliqued person would calm it down a bit? Oh gosh, the work though... I like machine piecing so much better... Sigh. I guess I have a couple of weeks to add to the quilt, and it can always be a going away quilt instead of a birthday quilt...]

Here's the backing, just pieced out of left over flanelette from all my kiddie-quilts.

Ah, and then the true quilter came through... it was 10:30 pm, and I just wanted to carry the quilt from the living room, where I pin, to the little quilt room I have. It was all neatly folded to be added to the other pile of pinned quilts waiting for quilting. That pile is growing because my machine doesn't have a way to lower the feet, so everytime I want to do free-motion quilting, I have to take the machine apart and remove the whole structure with the feet. Bit of a pain, therefore I try to do as much free-motion as I can at once before switching back to directional sewing.

Now, because of all the pink-quilt sewing and flanelette sewing, there was a lot of fuzz in the machine, and it was time to clean it, so when I put down the quilt, I thought: "Oh well, I might as well clean and oil the machine tonight and switch the quilting foot and then I'll be ready for quilting tomorrow."

Then I thought, maybe I should quilt the soccerball with the machine instead of by hand, because it'd be faster and look the same as the rest of the quilt, and they're straight lines and it's a small quilt so turning isn't as much of a problem. So I went ahead and did that...

I quilted once around the ball, then on each side of the seam using cream-coloured thread that would show up nicely on the black.

My poor camera didn't know what to do exposure-wise with this black and white contrast...

It went pretty quickly, and I'm happy to say that I made some progress on dropping the perfectionism - weirdly enough, quilting is helping me do that :) The lines aren't all the same distance from the seam and not always perfectly straight...
Okay, this ball is really much rounder than in this picture...

I like the effect on the back. (See, round after all)

Then I took the machine apart for cleaning and oiling... look at all this pink fuzz!

Cleaned and oiled:

Free-motion (darning) foot attached:

And I almost, *almost* started to do free-motion quilting around the soccerball, but it was close to midnight, and the next day, i.e. today was a workday, so I refrained, barely dragging myself away, and closed shop for the night...

Yep, and that's the danger of entering the quilting room on my way to bed!