Cell phone cameras and sampler quilts
My Quilt Addicts Anonymous 2014 BOM quilt is on the longarm right now. It’s been on the longarm for three weeks, and I’m just over halfway done.
While owning a longarm is on my quilting bucket list, along with having a sewing studio large enough to fit one, right now the only way I can use one is to rent time on the longarm at Quilting By-You in Bettendorf, Iowa. Between navigating openings in their schedule and my own, that means I get about six hours on the longarm once a week.
The quilting is taking forever since the quilt is HUGE, I’m stitching in the ditch between each block and along the borders and I’m doing custom quilting in each block.
Since it is a block of the month quilt, the blocks repeat four to eight times across the quilt. I’ve got a pretty good memory, but it is nowhere near good enough to remember exactly how I quilted each individual block. So to keep from having to roll back all the time to jog my memory, I made sure to bring my cell phone with me and snap a photo of each quilt block for reference before I rolled to the next section of the quilt
The photos aren’t fancy Instagram-worthy images. They are simply utilitarian shots to capture the quilting design I used so that when I encounter the block in another section of the quilt, I can replicated the free motion quilting design.
So far my favorite quilting design is in the center medallion, where I quilted a leafy fern with a spine coming out of the center where the two blocks meet. I really love the texture of that section and I think it will really pop once the quilt is completed, washed and laid out on my bed.
I think I have two more quilting sessions left before this monster is complete and I can officially delete the images off my phone. But for now I’ll keep scrolling back to avoid having to roll back.