November Quilt Goal Report

It's been a crazy month - I'm working more than I'm sewing and we've had a lot of family time with the holiday.  I also had a sewing block, which I worked through by cleaning up the piles of fabric left behind by several projects and getting myself a special early Christmas present.  This was an ambitious goal month for me - I had three things I wanted to accomplish.

My first goal was to finish my Modern Fans top, and I'm happy to say that I did!  I made it in time to be eligible for the grand prize of the sew along, and while I didn't win it felt good to finish on track.  It was a little windy when we were trying to take the picture and my helper wasn't feeling very helpful - I'll get a better one when it's all finished.

My second goal was to finish my Dwight the Deer pillow, and I was also able to do this as well - I put the last stitch into the binding on Thanksgiving Eve.  He got a full blog post to himself, but here's his picture again.

My final goal was to quilt at least one of my Tula Pink patchwork tops.  This goal underwent a bit of a transformation.  First, I don't really need two baby quilts so I decided to just stitch these together and get a more modern half blue, half green top.  This made it huge and more useful for my family (everyone always fights over the bigger-sized quilt tops!).  Second, my machine was acting up when I free-motion quilted Dwight and there were a lot of little knots on the back.  This has been an ongoing problem with quilting on my little starter machine, despite being cleaned out thoroughly by myself and having a professional tune-up.  So I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my machine.  It was a long week waiting for it to arrive, and when it did I immediately started free-motion quilting.

There were a few user-error bugs, but I am thrilled with how easily it quilts and how lovely the back looks!  Now I'm just waiting for the binding fabric I ordered on Black Friday to arrive!  I'll be back with a finished picture of it as soon as I'm able.  I'm linking up my successes with Elm Street Quilts.