I put her on the longarm yesterday, after prepping and ironing her backing and trimming the batting. It took all afternoon, so no work happened on my two new projects that are filling up the design wall.

I can set my machine to a VERY big stitch. When I am longarm quilting a quilt, I follow this same process, but just baste down the edges as I go–so the longarm needle plate does not get caught in the fabric at the edge of the quilt. Believe me, that creates a terrible mess. And, sometimes, at least once for me, a hole in the quilt. For a regular quilt I just sew straight lines across the quilt, and I measure the distance of the sides to the quilt frame to make sure the quilt stays even on its backing and batting.
But with a quilt I want to hand quilt, I make big curvy swirls as they will really hold down the fabric. The top might look a little puffy, but trust me, it is tight to the backing and batting as that is the gift of the longarm basting.

Here she is–and remember the camera distorts…

I have a whole little bin of Sulky 12-weight threads in so many lovely colors. And I want to use a lot of thread color in this quilt–probably to match the colors in the quilt. These are “little” spools that are very inexpensive at Red Rock Threads–under $3 each the last time I looked.

Tara Faughnan also likes Wonderful 12-weight “Spaghetti” threads, and she has a lovely package of them in her shop. I ordered it as I’d like to try the Wonderful 12-weight threads. Those two big spools are threads I’ve had for years, for decades actually, that I bought for a quilting project when I wanted a thick-thread look.
I won’t let myself start quilting this quilt, although my fingers are itching to start it, especially after taking Tara’s online class on hand quilting, where I got a much-needed refresher on hand quilting. I’m going to practice delayed gratification until I get the quilt from hell all together–and except for its borders, I’m close to that moment. Yeah!