Free-Motion Distraction

Right now the only thing capable of commanding my focus is the Free-Motion work on the queen-size Piñata Pizzazz quilt that I'm finishing up for a Colorado flood relief donation. I'll be linking up to Fabric Tuesday and  Leah's Free Motion Friday. 

 

 

I've finished the last piñata arm this morning. I'm aiming for a fiesta feel with the quilting. Hopefully that will translate to other people!

In the center I've got some scrollwork I drew in with a water-soluble pen, framed with double lines.

Then I surrounded that with some rose FMQ that's popular with Mexican styles. You can see that I treated the multi-row shape blocks as singular units.

I keep thinking how spectacular heavy silver thread would look on the whole piñata area, but I have to stick with what I have, and that would be pricy thread to order. I'm using smoke Invisifil with a gray 50wt Aurifil on the back. Working great.

On the piñata arms I went with the most open quilting I like to have on this batting (80/20 Hobbs cotton/poly). These I treated differently to help them stand out from the center and the backgrounds' future quilting. I ditched between each row to emphasize them and ran a single line of quilting down the middles, alternating strung circles and crow's feet lines. Those rows are probably 3.25 inches wide, each.

I didn't like what I'd originally marked for the tips (which I can't remember right now - they just ended up looking Masonic rather that Latin-festive), so I tossed on another Mexican rosette.

 

I'm about to put on a short show while I pin up the next round - the first background sections around the arms.  I'm going to put in a scrolly fill that I've wanted to try for a while, aiming for the spacing to be about equal to the width of my ring finger.   I'm hoping that will be a good width to let the more open quilting on the piñata arms pop up a bit above it, and leave enough room to move a little tighter (but not actually dense) for some meandering at maybe pencil-width in the outer background areas.  I'll go back to treating the color blocks as whole units rather than individual rows.

Wish me luck! I've not used the scolling motif before, so I'm a little nervous about the quality my work will show on a gifting quilt. . .

 

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Some thoughts on being a U.S. citizen right now:

I'm sure I'm not the only one studiously blocking out the political insanity we're all beleaguered with here in the U.S. 

We're currently on no pay, and since Scott is Active Duty Air Force labeled "Essential Personnel," he has to work with no pay and they've all had pre-authorized leave yanked from them. His nurse is losing many hundreds of dollars this weekend as their family was supposed to go on a special trip planned months ago.  For that matter, the 15 or so German exchange students our little town is hosting (Sophie is living with us for the month) is faced with losing several thousand dollars starting next week because they're supposed to go on a super-cool trip of many gorgeous Western national park areas, and almost all their lodging reservations are on park lands.

Their parents must be furious, and frankly - worried about their teens! 

 

Did you know they've gone to great effort to block off places like the Erie Canal - going so far as to remove the handles from water sources??  They've expended the time and money to take down Internet sites that require no effort to maintain, blocked national weather service, and even refuse to send response teams to horrific interstate traffic accidents.

How insane, expensive, and spiteful is that? I'm waiting for gas to skyrocket - seems like the perfect excuse for that industry to gouge us again. If I let it come to mind, I'm deeply, DEEPLY angered by this betrayal from our own government and the degree to which they are holding us hostage as pawns in their political warfare. Many of our friends are indefinitely furloughed and some face the possibility of not even being able to go back to their jobs whenever Congress and POTUS get their act together.

I am impressed with several Congressmembers who have all pledged their shutdown paychecks to charity or refuse to collect them. Our Colorado Senators are both donating to disaster relief. And lest you think only Democrats are being cool this way, our area's Representative is Republican, and he's refusing his check.

Unlike many other politicians.  I'm so tempted to send a sarcastic letter to Representative Renee Ellmers of North Carolina saying that while she can't refuse her paycheck because the bottom line is that she needs its, isn't it a good thing that our family doesn't need Scott's pay or that any of our furloughed friends don't need theirs? Our three Florida Members (Scott is still a resident there since he's active duty) are staying silent on the matter, which I interpret to mean they're all keeping their pay. You can track the individuals here: Senators and Representatives. And if you don't know who your Representative is, you can find out here: Who Is My U.S. Representative?

And I wonder how our politicians can be so incredibly removed from the real world - in a time of increased school, workplace, and public shootings - that they seem to think they can squeeze a population that's been stressed for many years now, and not have all kinds of stuff hit the fan. We've seen one shoot-out incident in D.C. reported so far (breaking out in the news just as I was thinking that the Secret Service must be *mighty* busy and wondering who protects Congressmembers), and a Congressmember has been accosted - I've seen whack-out militia types in the store stocking up on ammo and survival goods. . . I sure hope we don't get wide-spread rioting if this isn't resolved immediately. It's all ludicrous and scary at the same time, and all I can personally do after a year of financial stress because of constant pay issues due to political posturing is to give my mortgage and car loan holders the numbers of my Congressmembers and tell them: "Good luck!"