Grid Quilting

Among the important things to remember at the machine is to sit facing the needle so the body isn't skewed and stretched. A person gets mighty tired if they fight their body's natural position. Our bodies are the personal treasure we have in life. And a lot of us (including me) don't always have the healthiest relationships with our bodies.

Either I lied to my body, or she lied to me over the years and I did whatever I wanted; ate what I wanted, stayed up late, pushed beyond my stress capacity and stiff-armed it through whatever aches and pains I felt. Eventually, I slowed down, turned the loud music off, fell asleep during a late-night TV show, and felt indigestion. That was the moment in time that I knew I needed to pay attention to my own internal messages.

The real love I have for all of myself is growing. I like healthy foods. I like quiet. Every morning I wake up to the sunrise and  coffee and know that my life is good.

I am working on Lisa's Snow Gal quilt and decided to do a diagonal grid on it with about 6" apart lines. An easy way to work with a grid is to tape the lines with blue painter's tape, which comes off and doesn't leave a residue. Some people like the more decorative quilting lines and I like the utilitarian function that grid quilting provides.

My ruler is 6" wide and the 4-patches in the center of the quilt have lines that work exactly. The center piece is actually on a diagonal on the quilt though it shows going North-South/East-West in this more closeup picture. What is nice is that it allows me to hold many of the stitches in the ditch of the patches. After each line of stitching is done, the tape can be peeled away and re-used a number of times.

I've used the disappearing ink pen on lighter colored fabrics. Taping really works with this, and I guess its another lesson in using what works.

With so many ways to do this part, a person has to find her preference and test out the methods that work best. Its not about speed because slower is faster if you don't have to take time in recovering from mistakes. Wow, that was a lesson I could have learned earlier in my life!

My goal is to have this quilt done on the machine and hand sew the binding by the end of next week. One bobbin's worth of thread did a quarter of the grid quilting, and so the machine will need a cleaning when this part of the project is completed.  

Summer is almost over here in SoCal and soon it will be time for me to get into the gardens, pulling dried plant material out and making other fix-it choices for the entire property. Nights are already cooler and perfect for those quilts to lay across the beds.