OK...so this is the deal.....

Well, I made a deal with myself. I have wanted a new machine for sometime now. I finally made the decision on the Janome 1600P-DBX. I have to say, so far, I am totally loving this machine. I got an awesome deal on it from Sew-Vac-City. Their storefront in College Station TX is only about 1.5 hours from where I live, so I just drove up there to “test drive” a few of the models. All things considered, this is the one that I chose.

Now….the deal that I made with myself was that if I did get this machine, I would not spend any $ on fabric this month. My roommate cleaned out his closet and found basically a wheelbarrow sized load of really nice button down shirts that he was going to toss. Toss??? NO WAY! I snatched those shirts up like candy under a massacred piñata!!

I did not really know what I was going to do with them, but I knew that there was no way I was letting this really good fabric go to waste. I remembered seeing a site that had TONS of “scrappy” quilts…(Quiltville) and used one of their paper foundation pieced patterns. Considering that I am so new to this, and also, this technique reminded me of my great grandmother’s way of quilting, I jumped in.

I started slashing those shirts like it was nobody’s business, taking out the collars, yokes, and seams. I then cut them into 1.5” strips and separated them into lights and darks.

Then, I decided to piece them on 8” square paper. After reading some of the suggestions about this type of piecing, I shortened the stitch length considerably so that the paper would tear off relatively easy.

So far so good…all seems to be going along as planned. I couldn’t however figure out how I would quilt these little squares. I really don’t have the experience to do much as far as FMQ. Stippling for some reason didn’t seem to be the way to go in my opinion. I really wanted a scrappy, almost “crazy” effect. I decided to go ahead and use the quilt as you go method and quilt each block separately using a feather stitch.

This is really as far as I have gotten. 30 blocks finished, about another 60 more to go. BUT…the most important thing here is, I am not spending any $$ this month on fabric, and I am really giving this new machine a workout.

Till next time….!!