AQS QuiltWeek and works in progress

I'm very excited to say that I'm going to Paducah, Kentucky next week.  The AQS is having an Author Showcase booth at Fall Paducah QuiltWeek from September 13-16.  My scheduled time slot is Friday 15th at 2:30 pm. to do the demo and talk about my book.  I've never been to that part of the country before and I can't wait to see it.  I've heard of the National Quilt Museum in Paducah and I'm dying to see all the beautiful quilts in there.

I've been busy working on several projects. They are commissioned works, gifts and my personal projects.  I'll show more pictures when they are done.  I may have some quilts to submit to QuiltCon. 

I also have been working on my son's new quilt.  It's a HST quilt and I tried to quilt diagonal lines on it.  You can see the picture of the quilt here.   I used a Juki TL-98E and Aurifil thread to do the quilting.  When I finished all the quilting in one direction, I put the quilt on my work table to examine the quilting lines.  I used my hands to smooth out the quilt.  The thread snapped and broke in many places.  Every quilting line that I touched, the thread would break.  Plus there are a lot of skipped stitches as well.  I've used Aurifil thread to quilt before but never had such an experience like this.  I had to take out all the stitches and this was very discouraging for me.  I discussed this incident with my quilting friends in my mini group and the conclusion was the tension.  I just had this machine serviced by our local authorized Juki dealer about a month ago.  I'll bring the machine back to the dealer before I try to quilt with it again and hopefully it will be better than the previous attempt.  

Have you had this kind of problem when you quilt?  If any of you want to share your experience of quilting on diagonal line, please make a comment for me.  Thanks!!

On top of all these quilt projects, I'm reupholstering a sofa for my dear friend's daughter.  The original cover is old and faded, but the frame is in an excellent condition. She took some pictures as I go along, and here they are.

Sofa's before picture

Stripped it down to the frame, then covered with new material.

This is how the sofa looks today.  When the frame is all done, I'll work on the cushion.  Before I became a full time quilter, I did many re-upholstery projects.  Those projects were for myself, my family and friends.  Some projects were for strangers who heard about my work from friends.  I even got paid on some of the projects too.  I really enjoy re-upholstering furniture.  It's very satisfying to see an old piece of furniture get a new and fresh look. Picking out a new fabric for furniture is really a lot of fun as well.

Have a great week.  

Go do something good and fun!!