Weekend Accomplishments. This past weekend was the stashbuster retreat weekend. I quilted the baby Irish Chain top and am trimming up the thread tails so I can quilt the border. I also managed to baste my peach and blue nine patch top as well. Last night I began quilting it and after two passes ran into some trouble. I think it is the monofilament I am using. I had bought this thread a very long time ago and think that the quality isn't as good as the newer monofilaments. I will find my sulky and try that. It has a much better feel to it than the other and will probably work better.

I am now working on UFOs that had been made by other people. If you read previous posts you will see that I usually talk about why the UFO became a UFO. Let me start with the baby quilt. I bought this top off ebay. As it turns out it was a friend of mine selling it. She had quilted about half of it by hand therefore it was obviously all basted. She had pieced a cotton batt together for it. It has a muslin backing. The colors in it are nice and I just could not really see a reason for her to have given up on it. I picked out the hand quilting and started machine quilting it. I quilted it across the diagonal of the squares. The quilting went well but as I got further into it I could see where points were not matching and the quilting design was a little wiggly trying to follow the lines. I don't think these things took away from the quilt at all. The hand quilting would have been fine and whomever received that quilt from my friend would have loved it. I don't think there were any glaring errors that would warrant it being abandoned. So now I will finish it. I didn't have any particular person in mind when I bought this quilt. Since I have been on my crusade to finish my UFOs I learned that a friend of mine is expecting a baby. And of all days he is due on my birthday! I think I get the message!! I will gift the quilt to my friend and her new baby!

The peach and blue ninepatch on point. I bought this completed top from an antique store back when I was a new quilter. I picked it up from an antique store in Garland, TX that was near a quilt shop I frequented. I remember at the time I was wanting to get some tops that I could quilt and possibly some tops that might need a little restoration. I have 4 of these tops. 2 need no repair, 1 needs a small amount of repair and the last needs a lot of repair. It needs so much repair that I am not even counting it as a UFO. I am currently planning to practice restoration techniques on it only. But as I sit here typing this I am thinking I may have to cut it down a bit and finish it too. But I digress.

I quilted the first row of quilting in the ditch. It went fine and I was encouraged. **Note to self, roll that quilt better so that it is easier to handle please. The second row did not go as well. The points were not aligned and my walking foot would not walk over the seams as there was a big bump at the points. Then the monofilament was not cooperating either. I may just use a peach cotton/poly on top but will give the sulky a shot. I plan to stitch in the ditch on this entire top which will echo the quilting design in the plain peach squares between the 9 patches. Having handled this top a lot in the past two days I noticed that the creator was using every bit of scrap whe could find. There are 4 different blues in the top. The main blue seems to be a knif of some sort. One square even has a small print on it. A few of the nine patches were reversed in the color arrangement with the blue being predominant rather than the peach. The solid peach squares are all cut from a single piece but several of the nine patch peach squares were pieced from scraps. This quilter really had to draw on her resources to finish this top. I think I would have given up on it too. But after being so resourceful why stop there? Did the quilter pass away to the great quilting frame in the sky? There was no history with that quilt so that story is lost. I will label this quilt and credit the area where I purchased it and preserve some portion of it's history.