July OMG finished

Hi Everyone,

It's very hot here in Los Angeles.  I've been working on my July OMG for the whole month.  The goal is to quilt the quilt called 'Journey'.  The quilt is about 72" square but I had to make it 80" square for the quilting.  Here are the front and back pictures of the quilt.

Here is a closeup shot.

I don't know how to do free motion quilting, especially on a big size quilt.  I've played with free motion quilting on smaller pieces but I can't translate it to big quilts.  I chose to quilt it with a walking foot on my Juki TL-98E machine.  It's a great machine and works like a charm except when it decided to be fussy about thread tension.  I had it worked on by a Juki certified mechanic before, but it's still very temperamental.  It's very frustrating when I was in a middle of sewing and had to make a 90 degree turn, without warning, the corner thread became curved instead of having a sharp clean angle.  A seam ripper saved the day, again.  It happened so many times that I even thought of throwing the machine out the window.  I took many breaks, re-adjusted the machine and continued.  That's has been my experience for the past three weeks.  In the end, I finished it this morning.  All the loose thread ends were tied and buried.

I learned a lot from working with this quilt.  Thousands of times I wanted to give up and work on something else, but I kept telling myself  'Don't let the beast win!!'. 

I'll be very, very happy when the binding is on.

Maybe it's time to really be serious about free motion quilting.....