Backstory: A friend from church asked me if I could sew letters and numbers on a letterman’s jacket sleeves for one of her sons. I wasn’t sure if I could, so I said “possibly.” I watched a few videos on how other people did it, and fortunately the jacket had a zipper in the lining that allowed me to have access to the sleeve seams without having to take the lining apart.
I still had to remove the seam from part of the sleeves to be able to stitch the letters and numbers to them, which I did with my Bernina 440 (and black thread). And so that I didn’t have to unthread and re-thread that machine to sew the sleeves back together, I did that with my Juki (white thread). Perhaps it would have been easier if I’d reversed the two machines for the two tasks, but why do something easy when you can do it the hard way? LOL.
Anyway, they came out looking pretty good given the vision issues and machine wrangling (thank goodness! – wouldn’t want to ruin someone’s letterman’s jacket!!!).
So since I had the Juki all set up, I decided to drag out my string bins and start a new project. The Juki is the perfect machine for string piecing. It’s a workhorse, straight stitch only, and it has an automatic thread cutter. I never thought I’d have a use for one of those, but I love it for string piecing.
I had several projects I’ve been eyeing for a while, but the one that kept floating to the top of the stack was Bonnie Hunter’s Sand Castles, which is from her String Frenzy book. You can see the quilts from this book (including Sand Castles) in Bonnie’s String Frenzy Trunk Show post.
I’ve been making little four-patches as leader/ender units with many other quilts, but I still have a lot more of those to make as well. I’ll probably swap back and forth between two machines that I have set up currently – the Juki for string piecing, and my Pfaff 2046 for the unit and block piecing.
I decided not to participate in this year’s Quiltville winter mystery quilt, but I’m downloading all of the clues in case I decide to make it in the future. I just didn’t want the pressure of starting an unknown this year. Plus, the last couple years I’ve ended up modifying the final design after deciding I wasn’t thrilled with some of the elements of the mysteries. I think I’ve had enough of mysteries for the time being. But I’m not ruling out anything in the future.