pumpkins and ribbons and cleaning my machine

I know I’ve been a LITTLE quiet here,

well as you know I ordered some christmas fabrics yesterday, also last week some nice PINK ribbon fabrics came- breast cancer awareness fabrics.

A very close friend of mine got the sad news…. So I’m making her a pink ribbon quilt.

Pattern found here

http://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/2007/10/breast-cancer-awareness-free-patterns.html

all the fabrics are cut and ready.

FIRST I had to finish this fall wall hanging, well the top.

LOVE how it turned out! can’t remember the fabric line now, but I got the fabrics from fabric.com

machine appliqued all the shapes.

that sure takes a long time to machine applique, did a button hole stitch.

I will add this orange ribbon to the top of the tags, just not sure if I should do it now before it gets quilted or after, I’m thinking I should do it AFTER, so they are not in the way and so they don’t get wrinkled.

Then I have the idea of adding buttons to the ribbons right where they attach OR

I could attach buttons on the black band of fabric, sort of like in the magazine.

also I have to find the RIGHT buttons….

Now to a BORING part, but necessary and actually QUICK!

Cleaning my machine- the bobbin area.

so I got the screw loose after I removed the foot and opened it up!

WHOA! look at all that lint!

I use an old paint brush and brush it all away, it sticks to the bristles so they are easy to remove.

I also removed the bobbin carriage, a BIT tricky but worth it!

look at all the lint, I can make a BIG dust bunny with that.

Now it’s all nice and clean.

I clean my bobbin case area, after maybe every 3 projects or so, doesn’t take long, maybe 5 min.

and the machine runs SO much better!

About every 6 months I will have my husband take the whole machine apart and vaccuum out lint that got in further, but the bobbin case is where the majority gets to.

Here’s the beginning of the pink ribbon quilt, this block is 20″ wide, the ribbon is HUGE.

I also machine appliqued it with pink thread.