September Free Motion Challenge

I joined a Free Motion Quilting Challenge to improve my free motion quilting skills. This challenge is for items made on your domestic machine. I joined later in the year since I just started looking for free motion information. Starting in September instead of starting at the beginning (January), can present an interesting challenge I guess. I assume they started a little simpler and worked up to the harder items, but I haven’t gone back and looked at all the months so not sure. Either way, this is my first try at free motion on my domestic machine. It didn’t go too well with the thread. I have done some free motion on a frame with decent results once I got the tension figured out on that machine. Why it didn’t dawn on me that it could also be a problem on my dm, who knows. But there are lots of thread problems (mostly on the back) and several people on the Facebook group have suggested tension is the issue, so I will be looking into that on future free motion on this machine. But, I think this design is very pretty and thought for a first effort it came out pretty well. I will be continuing to practice this one, I would love to put it on more quilts. It’s a circular feather which was actually easier than I expected.

Let the games begin

Hello again. Now the blog should start getting interesting. A week ago tomorrow, I took a trip to Overland Park, KS and brought home my new to me APQS Millenium longarm machine. It's taken some work to get it setup. THe frame is 14' long and fairly wide so the space that I was sure it would fit in is pretty tight for sure. Some continued reorganizing in the area will help, but for now it's setup and ready to go. The next biggest thing I believe is the name. I'm told longarms need to have names. This is a Millenium so many of them are named Millie I believe. Although the picture I have of it to post on here, with the lights, to me it looks like a man's face. Willie is always an option. I really kind of like the name Wilbur but a friend of mine named her dog that. So many names, so many options. But for now, here is a photo of my Millenium, set up and just waiting for me to come make some masterpieces.