WIP Wednesday

As I mentioned on Friday, I bought myself a “little” something for my birthday…a new sewing machine! It’s a Juki TL2010-Q — a high speed, straight stitch machine — and after using it for a couple hours over the weekend I think I’m going to be very happy with my purchase. Two features that were big factors in deciding to buy a new machine in the first place are the larger throat/harp space (that’s the area between the needle and the vertical part of the machine) and the automatic thread cutter. I’m really excited about making my first quilt with this machine.

I wanted to start with something small, so I pulled out a Hugabook panel I bought months ago at Joann. The pattern called for fusible fleece to give the pages some weight, but I just used leftover quilt batting from previous projects and topstitched around the edges of each page to keep it in place. As I put the book together, the new Juki sewed through 6 layers of fabric plus 3 layers of batting like it was nothing. Soooo awesome.

I’m still plugging along VERY slowly on Charlotte’s Christmas stocking. Today at lunch I’m planning to check out a “Creativity Club.” Everyone who works at JSC gets a daily email about various things going on around the space center, and I noticed an announcement on Monday about this group. I love the idea of meeting up with other crafty people for lunch every month to work on our projects so fingers crossed that it’ll be fun!

On my last WIP Wednesday post, I was finishing up this quilt for my friend’s son. With that finally done, I’m finally making a twin size quilt for Emma’s bed. This will be the largest quilt I’ve ever made so wish me luck! I started cutting a couple weeks ago (as seen above) but got distracted by other things. I finished cutting last night and will hopefully get the piecing started tonight or tomorrow.

(Linking up with Let’s Bee Social at Sew Fresh Quilts)