Waiting. Waiting. Waiting...

Well, it has been about a week and a half since the first states got the results of the PE exam. Unfortunately, I took the exam in one of the slowest states. It is driving me crazy. I know I should just wait for the email but if I constantly check the website, maybe I will know before the email comes. It is pretty much consuming my life. Haha

So aside from that, I've been quilting my Charming Stars quilt! I basted it over Memorial Day weekend. My little Ikea dining room table just wasn't working - every time I moved the quilt to baste another section, I realized it wasn't lined up on one side and the backing was too short! After four attempts, I decided to go to the office for the afternoon and borrow some bigger tables.

Quick and easy! I pushed folding tables together outside of my office, turned on some music (Talking Heads - it was like a one-person party in the office!) and pinned away for an hour or two.

While at the office, I whipped up a curve template for my quilting lines in AutoCAD.  The curves are about 1/4" deep and of several lengths.  I printed them out, traced them onto template plastic, cut the plastic out and now I have a handy little curve template! ...and blue wash out marker all over my quilt!

 

The template has three different curves: one for the short sides of the star points (~2.25"), one for the long sides of the star points (~3"), and one for the charm squares (4.5").

The quilt is slowly being covered in blue marker lines...  They're not all drawn up yet, but I couldn't wait to start quilting it!  And then I couldn't wait to see what it would look like without the marker lines so I washed them out on the finished blocks.

About 7.5 of the 20 blocks are currently quilted - here's one of them.  I'm really liking it!  It's not too much more effort than stitch-in-the-ditch (okay, well, maybe it is when you consider that you have to sit and mark every line out with the template and then you have twice as many lines as you would otherwise), and it looks so much more complex!

The curves are slight, so the walking foot is handling it just fine. And the automatic thread cutter on my new machine is awesome!! If only the extension table would arrive soon!  I'll just keep waiting for that, too!

Now I just have to wait for the end of the day at the office.... then wait in traffic... then get home and start marking more blue lines!

(Linking up to WIP Wednesdays over at Freshly Pieced - I realize this is from Friday...but I just decided to do this on a whim!)