Sew-In Success

I loved my 1st Friday Sew-in, and my husband was working a night shift in the Emergency room last night, so it was a no brainer for me to participate again this month, and I had a HUGE break through in my sewing last night.  Don't you love when you actually see improvement?!  Free Motion Quilting has always stressed me out, because of a couple of major flops.  After a long period of avoidance, I've finally gotten to the point where I really don't want it to hold me back anymore, so when I saw a Free Motion Quilt Along - it called to me.  It actually made me excited to try.  They're already 6 weeks into it, but that's alright.

First I practiced the wiggle patterns to remind myself how to do it... (Week #1)

Then I stipled in rows in the center of the quilt... (Week #2)

 As you can clearly see on the back- I had some thread tension issues, but I fixed it for the next section I did...

It's funny that Scale is Week #3, because I noticed that my stippling got bigger the farther I got along in it, so I'm definitely going to have to work on that, but I'm thrilled with my first attempt at stippling...
I needed to stitch in the inner border (Week #6), and I am seriously so proud of myself for actually doing it! 

 You can see it on the back really well.

I decided to go all in and finally buy the quilting gloves.  I totally had one of those "I feel silly" moments - when I first put them on I was thinking, "what's the big deal with gloves?  I don't think they make that much of a difference."  Then I looked down and realized I had put them on so that the grips were facing up - oops.  I had a good, little giggle and then got stippling (with the gloves the right way - tee hee).  It is really funny though, because as soon as I started thinking "Oh ya- I got this" - that's when I started making mistakes...

Oops- I overlapped a couple of loops.

Despite the couple of mistakes I'm thrilled with the overall product.  I was grinning ear to ear when I finished top stitching last night (that's definitely a first).  When I turned off the light in the room I noticed that it made the quilting stand out a bit...

The other thing I quickly did last night was figure out which Skill Builder Blocks I want to use for the first quilt front.  I have 25 blocks and 13 of them have the black background, so I chose 12 of those 13 to put together.  This week I'll finish up the baby quilt and start adding sashing to these blocks.  It's gonna be a fun quilting week.