Newest finish

I'm excited to share my newest finished quilt with you today.  This is for the Paint Chips challenge we have at the Valley MQG.  I  picked an envelope that had a color card in it.  My card had purple, grey and white and I pulled these fabrics out of my stash.  It's amazing that I have a purple fabric that's pretty close to the color on the card considering that my stash is pretty small.  Thanks to Helen, my dear friend, and Eileen for giving me the fabric.

I only had a fat quarter of the purple fabric so I designed small blocks.  I had a lot of fun piecing these 3" curve pieces.  It was a bit challenging to me but it was good practice.  In the future I have to remember that when using white fabric, iron the seams open.  Did you see some colors show through?

When it was time to quilt it, I decided to use the nylon quilting thread instead of cotton 50 wt. thread that I normally use.  I loaded the nylon thread in the bobbin as well, despite the rumor I heard not to do that.  For this thread I set the tension to almost zero and it seemed to work well for my machine.  The quilting was almost hassle free except when I had to reload the bobbin.  Two new bobbins were completely destroyed when I tried to reload them with the nylon thread on my Janome 6500.  I was quite surprised because it has never happened before.  Is this a problem with plastic bobbins or the nylon thread?  Here are pictures of the broken bobbins.

In the second bobbin picture, the middle part where the thread is supposed to be came off totally.  It's buried in the tangled nylon thread.  Those of you who own Janome sewing machine, what do you think about plastic bobbins?  Have you had the same problem?  Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.  
 
Luckily I have a bobbin winder so I used that instead of using the sewing machine, and went back to quilting.  Despite all that, I had a lot of fun quilting this piece without any marking.  I felt so adventurous!!  It took about 4 hours for me to finish the whole piece, including the mayhem that I had with the bobbins.  I chose to do facing in the back instead of binding.  Facing gives the quilt a clean look and I really like that.  

Lastly, I want to share my personal feelings about nylon thread.  I'm not sure if I want to use it on a quilt that will be used everyday.  I don't know how the thread will hold up to frequent washing and drying.  But for art quilts, I love quilting with nylon thread.  The stitching is smooth and stitches come out so even and nice.

 Have a great sewing day!!

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