Saturday, April 9, 2011

Day 38 of 365

I had a fight today. Not with a person, but with a thing. A quilting thing.

A quilting frame, to be exact. I have a large Grace hand quilting frame that stands on the floor. It's been hanging on the wall of my sewing room holding my unfinished projects for quite some time now. I decided to finally finish up on one of my larger quilts (I think it's about 60" x 65") and wanted to hand quilt it. So it was time to get the frame off the wall and onto the floor.

I usually do all my hand quilting on that frame in front of our big picture window in the living room. That way I get the morning sun and get to look out at the river when I need to give my eyes a break. I used to do all my quilts on it. Since I was working I mostly quilted on the weekends, 5-6 hours a day. But that amount of time of the hands was tough, so I just stopped doing hand quilting and went to smaller projects that I could machine quilt on my plain old machine.

So this new larger quilt was going to be a refreshing change. And with me not working right now, I could spread the time I worked on it throughout the week.

Except the frame is a pain to put up. Setting it upright isn't too tough, but this quilt was just a couple inches too wide for the bars I had on the frame. Which meant I had to get my extension bars and attach them. Which is the pain in the rear part. Which means bolts and nuts and screws and washers and pliers and wrenches and Allen wrenches. And bars falling down and washers rolling away and nuts coming oh-so-close to falling down the heat vent.

And me getting frustrated, cursing at myself, at the quilt, at the frame. Finally, after several hours and lots of breaks to clear my head, it is up. And the quilt and the batting and the backing are secured. And it's ready to go. And time for me to relax. But not with that quilt.

There are two things I like to do best to relax. If you've read many of my posts, you know it's all about the baking and the sewing. So this afternoon I did both, as you can see in today's picture.

Homemade buttermilk biscuits and a new homemade bread basket liner. Ahh, relaxation.