Bomb Pop: Machine Quilting on my Home Sewing Machine

 I purchased the Bomb Pop pattern and fabric at Primitive Gatherings in June so I'd have something to stitch in the evenings when I wasn't working on retreat projects like Grand Old Flag and Forever USA.  I pieced Bomb Pop in an evening and a morning, then basted it while I had those big, beautiful, free-of-clutter tables in the Gathering retreat center.  I jumped right into machine quilting it when I got home.

If you've known me for any length of time, you won't be surprised that I chose ribbon candy for the quilting design in the white strips.  I didn't the red and blue strips to feel unloved, so I quilted them too, but with a wiggle instead of ribbon candy.  I like the contrast of the dense quilting next to the sparse quilting.

I chose white thread for the entire quilt.  Yes, some of my stitch in the ditch shows on the blue and red and I DON'T CARE.  Is that wrong?  I may make this quilt again and quilt it with invisible thread just to see if no-show stitch-in-the-ditch makes a ginormous difference, but I'm completely at peace with how I quilted this quilt.

During the quilting, my bobbin thread decided to get fussy so I had to break out my seam ripper to unpick about 5 blocks of stitching.  The joy of less than perfect tension is that it's super easy to pick out!

I filmed a short video showing how I quilted this quilt.  You can watch it HERE.

I'm in the habit of immediately machine binding my quilts.  The hour I spend doing that instead of letting my unbound quilts stack up keeps me sane.  Looking at a chair full of unbound quilts would make me feel completely out of control!  I've done it before; I know what I'm avoiding.

Like most of the northeast United States, we had ghastly hot temperatures last weekend.  I went outside to try and take some good photos and immediately remembered why I just had central air conditioning installed. I quickly snapped one photo of this quilt and here it is:

I have no particular recipient in mind for this quilt.  If no one comes to mind, I'll take it and some other quilts to give to my local police officers.