One goal accomplished

Yesterday didn't go quite as planned but everything worked out in the end. I spent more time than I planned dealing with what I thought was a plumbing issue but is actually an electrical issue. The water pump on my dye sink has been failing. I thought it was the pump but now we know that it's something in the electric box. Yesterday they replaced the one breaker switch but it failed again sometime after they left. I plugged the pump into another outlet that feeds from another breaker switch and it ran great. So it's definitely inside the box. I'm guessing that something was reconnected quite right after the generator was installed. We have a supervisor coming out Monday to look at it. Meanwhile now I know that I can use the sink and run the pump from another outlet.

​But the coolest part of all of that was that the electrician that came out yesterday was a woman! Yay!
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While I was still worried about the pump I decided to bring some fabrics that I wanted to soak up to the bathroom. These are the rest of my collection of my first-ever hand dyed fabrics. They are serious bleeders but I'm solving that problem this week and can then I'll be able to start using them with all of my other hand dyed fabrics.

I eventually got to working on my other goal of getting the big green quilt loaded on the longarm. It's a complex process because I want the front centered in this ice dyed back. Just between us, I like the back a lot better than the front!

I have a tutorial here for how to center a quilt on the longarm but here are the basic steps. I load the backing and then roll it until the center is in the middle of my working area. Usually the batting has a pretty perfect fold in the middle so I line up the batting fold along the center line of the backing.

Then comes the hard part of lining up the quilt top with the center batting fold. There's a lot of bulk laying around and you have to ignore it and only worry about that center. I get that one line centered and then baste.

Once the center is basted I can spread out the batting and quilt for the lower half of the quilt and baste the rest of the work space. Then I loosely roll the bottom batting and top onto the roller so that I can focus on basting the top half of the quilt.

Once the top is done I go back to the middle, unroll the batting and backing for the bottom half of the quilt and finish the basting. After a little bit of dyeing today I will be ready to start quilting! I think I'm going to do free motion swirls all over it. That will go fast and will add some softness to the straight piecing.