Started out as a bad weekend, but..

It finished pretty good.  On Friday, I went to work as usual and got home at the regular time.  We have two dogs and they are in the house all day (about 10 1/2 hours) without going to the bathroom.  I know, I know it is a long time, but they usually do pretty good without any messes.  Well, my DH got home before I did and he didn't let them out right away, so my boy dog lost control and peed in the house.

This went unnoticed for a little while until I went downstairs to continue quilting on my 12 days of Christmas quilt.  My quilt was soaked, with yup, you guessed it, pee!  ERRRRR!  The only good thing is that my machine was not in the line of fire.  So, of course I was mad, I was worried that my quilt wouldn't be salvageable, my quilt would smell, and well, just plain mad.

Now mind you, the quilt was only partially quilted and I had to take it off the frame to try to save it.  I soaked the quilt in laundry detergent, vinegar and water all night.  Then in the morning I rolled the quilt to ring out the water.  I didn't want to twist it too much because I couldn't iron it even if I wanted to because I used invisible thread.  I hung it up in the shower to drip as much water off as I could, then I laid it flat to dry.  Today the quilt is still drying but it is looking and smelling pretty good.  I did notice that a block has come undone so I will have to try to fix that.  These blocks are machine appliqued, so it appears that when it was sewn, it was sewn too close to the edge of the fabric.  I have to figure out how to fix this.  Any ideas?

This turned out to be a huge set back for me, I was planning on finishing this quilt so that I could move onto the next one.  Well, I did move onto the next one, but before I finished this one.  Hopefully tomorrow I can put the 12 days of Christmas back on the frame to finally finish it.  I did put my friendship blocks from 2009 together.  And, if I do say so myself, it came out awesome.  It is so pretty, thanks to my guild members who made the blocks.  I will take a picture of the quilt once it is quilted.  Don't want to ruin the surprise.

I still owe you a picture of the 12 days of Christmas, but that isn't completely quilted either, so that will have to be a surprise as well. 

Today was a good day to finish off the weekend with the Easter holiday, the kids coming over for an egg hunt and beautiful weather.  Until the next time.  Hopefully I'll have the 12 Days of Christmas finished the next time I visit this blog.

What I am doing now..

Yesterday I went to MQX (Machine Quilter's Expo) in Providence, RI.  What a great show and the vendors, as always, are great too.   I bought this new system to load my quilts, no longer using pins, called Leader Grips.  I think I will like it once I make an extension to my zippers.  I hope I like it anyways because it was kind of expensive.  I enjoy pinning the quilts on the frame, but if this will take me less time to get started then it will be well worth the cost.

Today, I loaded my 12 Days of Christmas wall hanging.  The extra canvas on my leaders will have to wait until after June.  We have a quilt show in June, so my focus is getting the quilts done for this show before putting those extra leaders on. 

I am usng Superior Invisible Monopoly thread on this wall hanging.  I haven't used this type of thread before so it should be interesting.  I haven't had any breaks yet, knock on wood.  The backing is looking ok too.  So off to quilting again.  See ya soon.

Productive day...

Today was a very productive day for me.  It was beautiful outside today, but I was bound and determined to get this quilt done today so that my friend Phyllis can put the binding on for me.  Tomorrow will be a day for working outside.

I was able to finally get the custom quilting done on that quilt from the previous post.  I learned a lot from doing that quilt.  I learned that I definitely need more practice.  I was able to get my feathers to look pretty good.  The egg and darts came out pretty good.  I had to rip out the first set of egg and darts because when I started going down the side borders, I realized they weren't going to fit correctly.  I also had to rip out some of the feathers on the right side because they were going the wrong way and they just didn't look good. 

Here are some pics of the finished 1st custom quilt.

I took a break this morning from working on this quilt and decided to make some pillow cases for my granddaughter. These came out really cute but it took me about 3 1/2 hours to make all three of them. I hope that she'll like them.

Tomorow, I will start another UFO quilt.