Free Motion Quilting and surprises

First up the surprise; the other day I looked out the window and saw this:

You can't tell from here but this is our Silk Tree and he's over 6 feet off the ground.   I had to tell him to come down though as the tree is getting old and has die back; luckily the branch he's on is currently unaffected as far as we can tell.   This winter we have 2 large branches to cut back at the base; which is a pity as it will spoil the tree's shape.
I think Ian really needs to live in the country with lots of large trees to climb; unfortunately here in the 'burbs there's only a few medium ones and they're all getting sad about being old.

In other news yesterday was a busy day.  First of all was the spinners guild and I took along my drum carder along with 2 other people and we had a demo.   I hadn't gone in planning on doing the demo, but when it was time to start I found myself up there and showing people how I use a drum carder; apparently a few people learned something from it, so I'm glad I did.  I took along a bunch of fibre for people to play with, so afterwards a few new batts were made and they all turned out beautifully.
I guess the main points I made were:
- don't overload the intake drum, if you can't see the wood through the fibre then there's too much fibre
- tease or flick card locks before putting them in to get a better result
- go slow, and I mean really slow!    If you're watching someone do it and you want to take over and go faster, then that's the perfect speed!
- some fibres are better being applied directly to the large drum as they tend to wrap around the intake drum.  Silk and many of the sparklies fit into this category; also anything hugely long.
One point made by one of the other ladies which is important: if using long fibres with short ones, sandwich the short ones on the drum between layers of long ones.  It makes the whole batt more stable; I think that was Paula.

After that I came home and did my free-motion quilting.   I used a burnt red thread on all the red sections and white on the teal and white bits.    Next step is to trim it, then add the binding.

Quilted but not trimmed, Star appeared to inspect the moment it hit the ground.

1st try of Railroad FMQ (double stippling)

1st try of pebbles

Echoing of the print FMQ

1st try of standard double stippling, you can see a few errors

2nd try of standard double stippling, a bit better.

3rd try of standard double stippling; getting better!

4th and best try of standard double stippling, I obviously still need more practice as the foundation line is a bit long in the stitches, but looking much better!

I've decided that although Ellie (my Elna) does brilliant FMQ her free arm is too small and you can't extend the table on it so I won't be doing larger quilts on her.  Bernie will be my fallback until I can save enough for a Janome Horizon or similar.  I want a bigger harp and more flat space.

Once I'd finished that I got all the school trousers to the next step; today I'll be doing all the seaming and hopefully elastic and hemming to finish them too.  Photo's will come once done.