A Friday Flimsy and Cleaning The Quilter

 Happy Friday Quilting Friends!  First I want to thank all of you who shared your thoughts on naming this quilt.  It's unanimous, she will officially be named A Podunk Picnic.  You all know me well and have chosen the perfect quilt name. 

Bonnie's mystery quilts are usually inspired by an event of some sort throughout the year.  One year she went to China and the quilt that year was inspired by all the colors she saw during her visit.  And since this one is called On Ringo Lake, I'm pretty sure she visited Ringo lake in 2016 or 17.  Her Ringo quilt was made with teal, brown, white and salmon fabrics.  Perfect colors for a lake quilt.

Click on image to purchase pattern.

Thursday evenings adventure of the quilt onto the quilt frame.

Before quilting A Podunk Picnic I need to do a little preventative maintenance on my quilter.   The quilter has been setting unused and uncovered since early September. I think I've only quilted one quilt since September but it was quilted on my domestic machine.

My quilter isn't some big fancy machine with bells and whistles.  She's a Bailey Home Quilter 15.  I've made a ton of modifications to this machine over the last 10 years to make her work the way I want her too.  The only fancy feature she has is a stitch regulator but it isn't as responsive as the newer stitch regulators on the big girl machines.

The manufacturer of this machine suggests oiling the bobbin area in between each bobbin used. I don't usually do that unless the machine sounds or acts like it needs it.  They also suggest oiling the bearing behind the bobbin area often.  When I talked to the owner of the company on the phone he suggested I oil after ever quilt because at the time I was quilting quilts to death.  These days I don't quilt my quilts to death but I still like to keep her oiled and running smoothly.  Taking it apart and oiling it between each quilt is much easier than having it lock up with a quilt on the frame.  Been there, done that and it's a chore.  You have 2 choices when that happens.  1. Take the quilt off the frame and oil it.  2. Leave the quilt on the frame and oil it.  It only took one time of doing #2 and getting oily black gunk on my quilt to change my mind about oiling in between each quilt.

Clearing out the gunk on the bearing is the worst part.  One or two drops of oil on the bearing and let my machine run for about 15 minutes.  Here's the oil I use to get into those tricky spots.  Before I found this I was trying to put a few drops of oil in a drinking straw to try to reach the inner workings of the machine.  Oh boy did I make a mess. This loosens up all the gunk.  Then once it's nice and warm I speed up the machine it throws the gunk everywhere.  Again it only takes one time of throwing gunk everywhere and you learn to cover the bearing with a rag or scrap fabric.  Could you imagine having this on your pretty new quilt top?  My goodness she was a dirty girl.

Cleaning the machine from start to finish takes about 2 hours.  While it sits idling and loosening up the gunk I dust and clean other areas of the machine and frame.  At last I can start loading the quilt backing.  With a pieced backing I like to have my seams running horizontal.  Vertical seams can cause puckering issues about halfway through a quilt.   You would think that it was as easy as pinning it on and rolling it up onto the bars.  NOPE.  I roll it up on the front bar, then roll it all onto the back bar and then back to the front bar.  Hopefully by this time the seams are lining up perfectly straight with the front bar.  As you can see in the picture below this one is perfect.  Yah!  I can get this girl loaded and based down before bedtime.

Oh but there's a snag in the works.  GRRR.  My quilt top is 75 x 90.  The only batting on hand is 72 x 90.  Sigh.  I could dig through the scraps of batting and make a franken-batting but it's late, I'm tired and I hate piecing batting.  Looks like I'm done for the day and there's going to be a road trip in the morning.

Oh well, I need to catch up on my reading of the book 

"Earthing, the most important health discovery ever"  

Boy what a long title.  When I was younger my books of choice were by Steven King, John Grisham, Danielle Steel and V.C Andrews.  I wasn't too picky as you can see by the list of authors.  These days novels bore me to death.  So I read books that teach me something.  I wish I had this love of learning when I was younger but that's a story for another day.  

Earthing?  What is it?  To sum it up short and sweet it's about putting your bare feet on the ground outside and the health benefits of doing so.  Who knew this is so important.  If your interested and would like to know more without reading, here's a link to the free documentary on Youtube.  It'll give you the basics in about an hour. 

I've been Earthing, also called Grounding, for a little over a month.  To my shock there have been some changes.  Could it be a placebo effect? Possibly.

  But here's what I've noticed.  Top of the list is I sleep more than 2 hours at a time.  For years(all my life) my sleep has been very little at a time.  Now I sleep 7-8 hours with one bathroom break. 

 As a quilters we stand or sit for very long periods of time.  For me the sitting causes leg swelling and the standing causes back pain.  Since grounding while doing either and grounding while sleeping, my swelling and pain have been reduced.  Especially the morning roll and groan to get out of bed.  It was a shock to me the first time I woke up and just got out of bed.  I didn't notice.  I had made it to the coffee pot one morning before it dawned on me how I just popped out of bed, dressed, made through the house without groaning in pain or running into anything. 

I could ramble on all day about this topic but I've got a batting run to make this morning.

  Hope you all have a Yippy Skippy day!

 

Happy Stitching!

I haven't joined in with a linky party in a long time.  While reading quilting blogs this morning I saw this one and thought " What the heck, lets link up!"  Hop on over, you might find a new to blog or a must make to add to the ever growing list.

http://alyciaquilts.blogspot.com/2021/02/suitable-for-framing-finish-and.html