J Miller

Well here is my first quilts. My wife Elaine and I have made two quilts for my last two aunts that live in Arizona. They were finally finished yesterday (2-24-13). About three months late. I wanted them there before Christmas. But anyway tomorrow we get them boxed and out.

Here is a pic of each quilt, the wind wasn't cooperating so they were blowing around when I took the pics.
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Aunt Dorothy's quilt.

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Aunt Sheri's quilt.

The trim around the center section and the edges is as close to their birthday colors as I could match with fabric.

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Both quilt tops were pieced together with my moms old HOTHER 15 clone. Here I am doing one of them.

The backing piece on both quilts had to be pieced too. My wife said; do a flat fell seam down the center and it will be strong and very neat looking. Not being too good at those seams yet she just sat down and did them. Zoom zoom, and was done before I could take a pic of it. I don't even remember which of our vintage machines she used to do it.

Here is Elaine pinning the sandwich together.
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She must have used a hundred safety pins on each quilt. At least it felt like it when it came to taking them all out.

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We decided to use the SITD method to quilt them, so here is Elaine trying to do that with the HOTHER. It just would not cooperate. There wasn't enough room under the arch, and at that time it had one of those pinkish/amber cogged belts on it that kept slipping. So we decided to try another machine.

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We switched to the 201-2. Much better. No lack of power and much more room under the arch. It sewed through the sandwich like it was two layers of cotton.

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Inspector Pollyanna checking on the progress.

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While doing the quilting the white edged quilt got singed by the machine's light. Oopsie!

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We tried several things but we just couldn't get rid of the burn. So Elaine patched it with another kitty picture. Had to keep with the motif. I wanted to use a paw print though.

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Doing the binding with our 319K. We used the #20 wavy line cam. It turned out pretty good .
The 319 is Elaine's dream machine. When we got it she himmed and hawwed and didn't want to bid too much. I said: "You have the money, HOW BAD DO YOU WANT IT?" She hammered the other bidders with a big bid and they gave up. All we've done with this machine is clean it a bit, oil it and use it. Very nice machine.

After finishing the machines we took them to the laundromat and used the huge 50# machine to wash them. Then dried them.

After hanging out for a couple days we inspected them. One tiny little separation of one pieced section on the red edged quilt, and a couple inches of binding separation on the white edged one. Not too bad for our first quilts. Those were easily repaired. All but impossible to see the fixes too.

Both of these quiltes started out as lap quilts, then grew into a bed quilt.

This has been a learning experience. Now on to the next project.

Joe