What Makes a Long Armer Smile?

There are a number of things we long armers love to have happen when working on a quilt; seam threads trimmed, measured borders, seams pressed well. But the ultimate happy thing is when you have even stitches on the back and front of the quilt, which is a sign of good tension.

Prewound bobbins were giving me fits instead of good tension. Or so I thought. Upon further inspection, found my bobbin case to have a ball of lint/thread stuck in the tension arm thingie and this was causing some issues yesterday.

Once discovered, the tension was dead on. I smiled from ear to ear once I got it straightened out. 

Patty's quilt is done. I have a top ready to baste in on Marty, BUT, the next backing I pulled to frame iron on Bernie was rather large. And the one on Marty isn't. I'm going to swap those two out this morning because I'm not fighting with a huge quilt on Bernie and a small quilt on Marty. 

Need to swap these two out

After Patty's quilt was finished, I cut a few pieces out for the next set of Tilda blocks (I thought I needed 12 of each block, but turns out I only need 10) and set those aside and decided DW needed to be fired up. I hadn't touched him since he came back two Friday's ago from Gall. 

But first...mowing. Yep, it's that time of year. It's great living the north because we are two or three mows behind the downstate folks. And we'll stop a few mows before they do too. While Jim was on the big mower, I was pushing the area in front of the studio, the little area between both decks, and the dog pen. I ran the weed whipper dead after mowing and then came inside to work some more in the studio. 

DW is stitching great, but for some reason, is dragging towards the belly bar. And I mean dragging badly. I adjusted some of his cables in back and was kind of tired at that point so don't know if that was a fix or not. I decided to work on a few pieces of the next set of sewing machines. Alas, I have two sets of three finished...

The first set of three

The next set of three

These are fun to make. Linda over at Pieces said it was a difficult pattern, but so far so good. Although, the pattern writer said these were the easier of the sets of blocks so maybe that's why I don't find them all that hard. 

Raining all day today. Had a customer show up unannounced yesterday to pick up but nothing earth shattering expected today. A good day to crank up the tunes and do some rearranging. Which I've already started because we have to get the spare bedroom rearranged and free of most batting.