Popping back in...

Not much forward progress on the quilts.  A little bit of one step forward two steps back this week.

Over the holidays we headed to Florida to spend time with my family.  I brought a hand piecing project along with me and barely took it out of the travel case.  This is an improvement over the trip in October where I packed my sewing machine when we went to Disney in case of rain.  Had wonderful weather. Never took it out of its case.

We returned a few days earlier than planned and I finally tackled the project I've been planning since June when Gus went to stay with my parents for two weeks...  Move Gus's room to the "office/storage" room and create a sewing/office space in his old bedroom.  I figured that I could get a lot of it done with the two non-hockey weekends. Sadly, I caught a cold halfway through, with only 2/3 of the furniture moved, so we've been climbing over things for a few weeks now as hockey started back up with a vengeance.

Finally, last Thursday night, I was able to move my sewing table into my new space and by Monday night I put books on the shelves and hung rulers on the wall. And I even sewed.  And here is where two steps back enters the picture.  I started to notice that I was pushing a wave of fabric along the seam, especially where I crossed the horizontal anchor seam.  Still not thinking straight, and excited to be sewing again, I soldiered on and finished the stitch-in-the-ditch anchor seams.  Tuesday morning I figured out the problem - and gained a whole new appreciation for my walking foot which I had forgotten to install.  Tuesday night I took the seams back out - fastest seam removal ever...

You see, following a recommendation by Harriet and Carrie, I used water soluble thread to SID because I wanted to stabilize the quilt before doing the diagonal cross-hatch and the detail work but I didn't want to keep the vertical or horizontal seams.  The seams were never meant to stay, which is why I think I got careless thinking about the lumps on Monday.  At least the seams came out quickly with the liberal application of the spray bottle.  I'm hoping that the quilt will be dry when I get home this evening so that I can repin the parts that got unpinned on Monday and put the stabilizing seams back in.  I took the break last night to thoroughly delint the 830 and get more of my sewing space organized.