Training Day

It’s a rare occasion to have time to squeeze in quilting for myself during the week. Treating it as a training day--learning a new technique, testing out a spiral template for my Gammill Workstation was interesting. The quilt that I chose for the spirals is Diamond Box, a free pattern from TimelessTreasures. The finished size is 64" x 52.5"(not including the shoes at the bottom.) The background fabric is a grey and black batik with just a bit of light blue, given to me by a quilting customer. Most of the block fabrics came from stash.
 

It’s a very angular design, and the curves soften it. There is a spiral centered in each block, and overlapping smaller spirals in-between and on the borders. The surprise when I took it off the rollers was that two of the smaller spirals had a definite shape problem—very odd as the template uses a stylus in a groove, and there were no issues with the stylus jumping the track. The squashed shapes were not visible on the top, but on the solid light grey back they stood out. It was worth my time to rip out the stitches, re-load the quilt and re-quilt the two spirals.

Overall I’m pleased with the design. It took a couple of hours to tie off and bury the stop/start threads on each spiral. Spirals are a bit trickier to place than concentric circles. Moving the Workstation  was a bit of a pain, and once I used binder clips to keep the sliders locked in place so it didn’t shift, almost fun. If I ever make the move to a computer-driven quilting machine I would make spirals very often.  

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