Quilts and crochet

It's official now, my longarm is well and truly fixed! The tension is perfect just like it used to be. No more thread breakage, no more shipped stitches and no more bobbin nests. Best of all I feel very confident that I can fix it myself alone going forward. I even feel like I could work on mu Juki straight stitch machine if I needed. My brother (the auto mechanic) has repaired a couple of sewing machine himself so we're probably going to service my Juki together at some point.

I immediately got busy tackling the stack of 20+ veterans quilt tops that I have here to be quilted. I've told the group that I'm not taking any more tops until September, after vacation. I'm going to quilt as many as I can this week and then I will not quilt any others until the fall. I've done 34 already this year and now it's time to work on some of my own quilts.
These 4 were made by 2 club members and are only 4 of the 10 that they made from the fabric that was donated to us from Benartex (to compensate for the quilt that was stolen.) These fabrics are so busy that it doesn't matter at all how I quilt them.

With the goal of speed and volume, most of the quilts getting quilted this week are getting wavy straight lines, ribbon meander, wavy cross hatch or some other type of continuous curves. All of those are fast and I can get 2 quilts loaded, basted and quilted in less than 3 hours. My goal is going to be to get 2 done every day this week through Saturday. On Sunday I'll load one of my own quilts.

On the crochet front I'm making progress on the corner-to-corner blanket. I haven't been a big fan of the c2c blankets but now I get the attraction. It's so fast and easy! I think this Cascade Cartwheel yarn is beautiful and it will make a very soft wheelchair lap blanket. Working with the bulky yarn seems to be more tolerable for my hand as well for the moment. I've devised a weighting method with the yarn so that I don't have to use my fingers for tensioning and that's working really well. I'm also taking lots of breaks. I like this yarn so much that when I saw that Webs had it on clearance I ordered a bunch more. It's 40% off right now and it was an additional 15% over the weekend but I think that part of the sale has ended. It seems like June is the big yarn clearance month. 

I got the 4 quilts done before I left for Eli's birthday party Saturday. Mom and I had a great time watching the kids play on a giant inflatable water slide. It was a fun afternoon. After the party we stopped by Joann's. I've been researching loom knitting as a possible car project and project to do in the evenings when I need a crochet break. I picked a pack of looms and a $3 ball of bulky yarn and watched a bunch of You Tube videos. I think this is going to be a fine project to do when my left hand gets fatigued with crochet. This is mostly a right hand task and I can make hats and scarves to donate.

This week is going to be all about veterans quilts. I don't have any appointments or house projects so I should be able to get through the quilts and maybe even get some other, more interesting, sewing projects done.