Favorite New Tool

I had a good block of time over the weekend, so knuckled down and machine quilted my spiraly quilt (see last post), which I'm now calling "Frenzy."  The quilting was pretty much a breeze on my new Janome 8200 with all its great features (stitch-in-the-ditch walking foot, variable speed control, auto thread cutter and more ... plus that 11 inches of throat space for incredible maneuverability.

However I was still left with about a thousand threads to bury - as many as eight at the end of each row.

Can you imagine having to thread each and every one of those threads onto a regular needle? Believe it or not, that's what I used to do - until I discovered the "self threading needle."

These things have changed my life!
You just slip the thread in from the top, pop it into the groove, and you're good to go.
You can actually get several threads at a time into it, speeding up the process even more.
(I tried to get some photos of that, but it all came out in a blur, in spite of the "micro" setting on my camera... sigh ~ )

This graphic explains it much better than I can.
It only shows one thread but believe me, you can pop several in there.

So the quilt is now done, all that's left to do is the binding, which will be the same as the border fabric so this is pretty much what it will look like.

I auditioned several fabrics for a second border, but nothing really worked.  As it is, its a nice throw.

Here's a detail pix that shows the quilting a little bit better.  Very simple, not too dense so it has a really nice drape.

This will either be for sale in the general exhibit, or will be on the auction block, at our (PVQA) Quilt Show in February.

love,
Sandy