Off on another tangent

I recently sold my Featherweight free-arm machine for a lot of $, so spent some of it joining Sharon Schamber's web site as a Premium member. She has a lot of excellent teaching videos there. I've set myself the goal of becoming a decent machine quilter. I am practicing on charity quilts for my guild. The other ladies are horrified at the amount of quilting on the one I did last week, LOL. The one this week is just as bad. Sharon recommends practicing 4 basic shapes until they become ingrained in the brain. I just started the third charity quilt, and am branching out to combined shapes on this one. She said it takes 200 to 300 hours to get pretty good, so I have a very long way to go, and my goal is more like "adequate". I'm doing it on my dearly loved treadle machines. They make lovely stitches. I am working on making the stitches more even. I also used some of the money to purchase a Janome DC3050 electric machine, so I can do a double blanket stitch for applique. It was less than $600 and does what I need. Seems odd to buy a machine to do that one stitch, so I tried out some of the others. There's a stretch stitch that looks something like a stem stitch, that I stitched out in dark green, then stitched over the top of it with the feather stitch in light green, which made an interesting stem. I'll use that with some appliqued flowers on the Drunkard's Path quilt that I'm working on. It's going to take a long time to finish this one, since most of my quilting time will be used practicing the machine quilting for a while. I tried to put a pic of some of the blocks here, but it didn't work for me today. Maybe I'll try again later.

I've also lost a total of 51 pounds since October of 2006, and continue to lose very slowly.

Pat in Rockport, TX, who has missed the show in Paducah two years in a row, sadly.