Super Stippling Progress

After my Free Motion Practice post the other day I started quilting my concentric hexagons quilt (which really does need a better name, suggestions please?) and I thought I'd share my progress.

Since the weather has been pretty hot here this week I sought sanctuary of the living room, as my room can get very hot in summer and the living room has air con. However, we currently don't have a dining table, so I set myself up in a very unconventional and probably highly un-ergonomic setup using my coffee table.

I used the coffee table, a stool and the couch to support the weight of the quilt so that it wasn't pulling on where I was stitching. Then as always I always do whatever type of quilting I'm doing, I started close to the middle and worked my way out.

Despite the unconventional setup I am pretty happy with how my stitching is working out.

It also looks pretty good on the back (see below). Since the print is quite busy already and the navy bits alerady have some beige lines it actually (surprisingly) sinks into the print quite well and looks alright.

I did maybe 1/4 of the quilt over the course of the evening, which was 3 or 4 bobbins worth of thread I think.



You can see above how much I have done so far. I started up the top, and worked my way around a bit in the middle then moved across to one edge, then back across to the middle then kept kind of wiggling my way out until I reached the corner and then started working across the bottom edge.



I'm planning to take this along to the MMQG Sit and Sew Evening tonight to make some more progress on it.

And just so you don't think that everything always works perfectly, here's some stitching that went wrong:

This happened straight after I re-threaded the machine after the first bobbin ran out. I stitched maybe 6-10" of stippling and noticed that the stitches looked a bit loose. Then when I looked at the back of the quilt I had these terrible loops happening. Not good! So I stopped, unpicked the bad stitches (which thankfully was very easy) and completely rethreaded the machine, which fixed the problem.

So, if you ever end up with funny stitches, the best course of action is to re-thread your machine, as that usually fixes the problem