Back to quilting

It seems like ages since I quilted anything. Yesterday, I paid a visit to the sewing room, looking for something little to ease my way back into creating. A fabric postcard was sitting on the cutting board, started sometime in March when I finally broke out the Embellisher. The base is a Goodwill find: a grey wool skirt that felted nicely. An acrylic-wool blend chunky yarn needle felted wonderfully onto the wool. I added a novelty yarn that also felted better than I expected. I free-motion quilted around the novelty yarn, with mixed results. I used Aurifil thread in the bobbin, which I love to use in the bobbin and needle when piecing. However, I can't seem to get the tension set correctly when I use Aurifil in the bobbin with any other kind of thread in the needle.

After quilting the postcard, I added some seed beads to the design, which makes me think of a picture of new stars. I pulled out a couple of drawers of beads from the nuts-and-bolts-type of storage unit and proceeded to dump an entire drawer of seed beads all over the plush carpet. Arrrgggh. A few choice words and a lot of picking later, I had most of the beads back in the drawer. That is, until I reached for it again to dump a few more in. Result: beads all over the floor again. At that point, I went to the linen closet, grabbed the vacuum, and smilingly sucked up the blasted beads. The experience just reinforced that old lesson: Don't sweat the small stuff. Too bad I hadn't thought of that before I started picking up the beads...