Eye on the Machine—Stippling, Day Four

Well, my 12 day estimate may have been a bit short! Ugh! This quilt is so big! I don’t think I’m a third of the way done, and here it is day four already.
So here’s the view:

Looks pretty much like day one, doesn’t it? Yeah, it’s feeling a bit endless right now. Maybe by tomorrow, I can say I’m a quarter of the way around the outside, but there’s still the inside setting blocks to do after. Anyway, on to the point of all this.

So you can see I’m on the edge here, and the edge is one of those places where control becomes more difficult. There are many different things you can try to get a better grip on your quilt, like girpper gloves, machine quilting hoops and even quilting mice! I use a hand cream, Neutrogena Norwegian Formula Hand Cream, to be exact. Love the stuff. I think I need to call my investment guy and tell him to buy stock in Neutrogena, I buy that much of it. Diane Gaudynski shared this tip in her first book Guide to Machine Quilting, and I haven’t used gloves since! I was always having to take the gloves off to clip threads and restart the quilting line, rethread the machine, etc., since I couldn’t grab threads and control thread snips with the gloves on. Painful! The hand cream doesn’t come between my hands and precision tasks, doesn’t leave a residue on the quilt, and is a bit tacky on my hands so I can control the quilt better. I keep it next to the machine and reapply as soon as I can feel my hands slipping on the fabric.

Gotta go, must stipple.

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