Sorry that I'm late in wishing you a great new year! I'm hoping to feel better enough that I can get more done and create some more finishes.
This past month of January, my goal was to finish quilting the two mini ModaLove quilts.
I've also been able to spend more time quilting, more days of this past month, than I have in a very long time. I haven't been feeling well for such a long time, and I'm trying to push through it.
The other part of my goal for January was to finish the quilting on the Autism Swoon for my son. I didn't finish, but I feel like I'm making a lot of progress.
A couple of weeks ago, after I pulled it out, my son came this up to me and said "Mom, are you going to finish my quilt now? I really need a bigger quilt before I'm a big teenager!"
I laughed and asked "Did you just remember about it, or did you see that I pulled it out to work on it again?"
"I see you're working on it again! When will it be done?"
He just turned 10, and the baby just turned 3, so that means I've been working on this quilt for just over 3 years. Yikes.
This is great, but it's also made it difficult and slow and energy-zapping to push and pull it through my little Bernina to quilt it. Sometimes it just hasn't been fun, and sometimes I've wanted to cry. I haven't touched it for at least a year or more, because my health problems have zapped my energy and motivation and mental health. I know what's going on now, and trying to get treatment, so I'm determined to finish this quilt!
I know how you feel. I deal with fatigue and depression from the drugs I take to calm the tremors in my body. I have essential tremors I inherited from my dad. I too have done some free motion quilting and it's quite a challenge not to get agitated and upset with the process of shoving the quilt through the little space on the sewing machine. I tried long arm quilting. They have a machine at a library not too far from me. Using the long arm is a bit easier because you don't fight with the quilt and the stitching looks better because of the stitch regulator but they have drawbacks of their own. You still can become fatigued because now you're standing the whole time. Plus they can be quite temperamental. More than once the machine's tension was off even though everything was threaded correctly. I was told by my guild mates who own these machines that you have to walk away and come back later to try again. That doesn't help when you drove almost 30 minutes to get there and you only have three and half hours to work. I'm not what the solution is because sending quilts to a long arm quilter can get expensive.
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