A Safari Moon quilt

Welcome to my stop on the Safari Moon blog hop! I've got a quilt to show you, using Frances Newcombe's Safari Moon line, of course.

This quilt has been a bear to work on. It went through more design changes than I care to mention—I made changes literally right up until I sewed the last seam! But I think the beautiful colors of the Safari Moon line positively shine when paired with this background color, which is Kona Cotton in Regal (another one of my new favorites, I think!).

But notice anything missing in the photo above? Like, say, half the quilting? I was FMQing along this weekend, all in a groove, and then, bam! My bobbin case somehow unseated itself and went all crooked inside my machine. Broke my needle and everything. Like so:

See those red arrows? They're supposed to be lined up. How does something like that even happen? Nothing I did would get it back on track and working again. Every time I put the bobbin case back in straight, it would get all whacked again after about every third stitch. So, my machine is headed to my repair guy at the earliest convenience. The whole thing is making me very unhappy.

But hey, check out what I did get done! One of the reasons I don't use more dark background colors in my quilts is because of the challenge this leads to in quilting. I like my quilting thread to blend, but there's no single color you can choose that will blend in all the areas of a high-contrast quilt like this. And you guys, I hate burying knots. Sometimes I feel like I've spent my entire quilting career thinking of ways to avoid burying knots. Fortunately, Katie convinced me to get over myself and quilt with two colors, knots and all. And I'm so glad she did! It was definitely the best choice for this quilt. I'm stippling in the dark blue areas, and I did wavy lines in all the other areas.

I'll be finishing this one up as soon as my Janome dealer nurses my machine back to health. And I'm definitely writing a pattern for this quilt! I'm cautiously optimistic that I can have it out and available in the next two weeks. (Though that's dependent on my machine, of course!)

And in the meantime, my back-up machine, the Hulk (ironic nickname courtesy of my guild friends) is back. Oh, Hulk. No offense, but I didn't want to see you this week.Thank you, Frances, for having me on your blog hop and asking me to play with your lovely fabric line!