After a long period of missing in action due to being busy with a rather long project (90*108″ Millefiori / La Pasacaglia handstitched patchwork without paper pieces), I’m back with some smaller, quicker projects. The patchwork for these two pillows was done before I began the large Millefiori, but I got rather frustrated with the quilting. My Pfaff would skip stitches no matter what I tried to fix it, so I just abandoned almost finished quilts and went on to do more of the same: hand stitching small triangles, diamonds and pentagons. About two weeks ago I got patchwork almost done, but still need to add border, so I looked up some sewing machines on Craigslist and got my eye on a Huskvarna Viking Quilt Designer 2. However, I felt like I would need to do more research to find out which machine would give me all the options that would be helpful for my work. I gave my vintage Pfaff 130 another go (that was more aluring than looking through sewing machine listings and specs!) hoping to at least finish the little bit of quilting I had left on a second pillowcase. And to my astonishment, the machine has fixed itself! It quilted fine without skipping stitches, whether I did free motion or straight line with regular foot and feed dogs. Even the thumb screw that holds the foot got somehow repaired so that I didn’t need to use screwdriver anymore to tighten it all the way to hold the hopping foot, or loosen it to take the foot off. Perhaps poor Pfaff got scared of being replaced and made sure to improve its performance.
I wanted to make patchwork for the other side of the pillowcases. I went with pentagon log cabin, since I wanted to give it a try, having never done it before. It was fairly easy and straight forward. I’ve made a design in Illustrator first, because I would need the shape of the four triangles that would fill up the square, which actually was a rectangle, with one side less than an inch longer than the other. I printed triangles and pentagon on paper and used them as patterns to cut the fabric. This side remained patchwork only, without batting, backing and quilting. Here’s what it looks like:
