Sweet Sixteen Handi Quilter – OccasionalPiece

Keagan, my first grandchild, came to visit me last month (along with her Mom–our daughter– and family. She’s crazy about Paris and France and all things French, so I collected a few fabrics before she got there and surprised her with them.

And you just can’t leave it at that in a quilter’s house.

L’Amour recoufortand de Paris, quilt #167
Pieced and quilted by Keagan Charon and Elizabeth Eastmond
July 2016

L’Amour recoufortand de Paris, the title, means Paris’ Comforting Love, because she considered how quilts give comfort and since it had all things Paris in it, she thought it up and had my husband translate it for her.

Keagan_5 We got all the pieces cut out, then I had to go and Take Care of Things, and when I came back, this was the design she’d carefully put together on the design wall. We sewed the pieces together–me on my regular machine, and she beside me on the Featherweight– and we put the top together. Her brother Riley helped iron the blocks; it was a team working together.

I stitched most of it on the Sweet Sixteen machine, but had her take a turn at the quilting, so she could say she’d help quilt it, too.

Since we were working against a deadline, we used a glue stick to tack down the binding, and then I top-stitched it into place.

And then, just like that! it was time to head on home. Here they are Sunday morning, all the kids (Keagan and Riley and Maddy) lined up for a picture before they piled in their van to drive home.

So here’s a short story: This all started two years ago when I test drove a Bernina FancyPants Machine during one of my Road to California classes. That thing could do everything but cook dinner, and I pined about it for a year. I love my current Husqvarna Quilt Designer machine, but it is coming up on it’s 14 year-old birthday and one morning, I woke up with an unhappy touch screen. Horrors! and so the intensity of my search increased, or at least the anxiety of wondering when my machine would conk out on me. Then I took a domestic free motion quilting class with David Taylor this year at Road to California and at first, I was unhappy that we were working on Handi Quilter’s Sweet Sixteen machine–what? No teensy weensy harp space of my regular domestic? But the techniques are the same, so I took to this machine like a duck to water.

Now I needed TWO machines: one to replace my aging Husqvarna and this new Sweet Sixteen quilting machine. But I only had resources for one. After some time to think about it, I decided I could prolong the life of my Quilt Designer if I took the quilting tasks off its back. One afternoon last week, Richard of Quilter’s Cocoon toted this up to my guest bedroom, set it up for me, gave me my first lesson (so happy I’d had the day with David Taylor to augment what Richard was teaching me), and I was up and running.

Except I wasn’t.

I didn’t touch if for two days. Scared? Excited? Thinking I was out of my mind? All of the above? But I finally put together a mini quilt sandwich and went to town, trying out new stitches, using the two rulers I’d purchased, taking it out for a test drive. Notice how all four corner blocks are different; I was having fun. No, I don’t name my machines (but know a lot of people do, and invariably it’s always my childhood nickname of Betsy — which explains why I don’t do it) but we do refer to it as the “quilting machine,” to keep it distinguished from my “regular machine.” (By the way, the pattern for this quilt — Ribbon Star Beauty — will be up on Craftsy later on this week. It’s a fun little mini that sews up quickly.)

My daughter has a new shop in her small town of Kingman Arizona, The Farmhouse Kingman. I plan to send this to her so she can use/sell it in her shop. If you drive through Kingman on your way to somewhere else, stop by and see her. She’s in the old section of town, with a cute shop of fun farmhouse decor items.

And that’s the whole story. Now back to quilting.