And it's Friday

The worst of the weather moved through before I went to bed. There was a lot of thunder late but nothing severe. (I didn't even hear any hail).

I don't know that I'm going to go do anything today though, we might get storms again and there's flooding various areas. (I'm already worrying this summer may be a repeat of 2007, when I had to find alternate field sites for my summer class because every of the ones I normally used had flooded).

I MIGHT sew up a backing and take in another quilt to be quilted. I pulled out the Bento Box quilt I finished 2 years ago and decided that I like it, after all, and that maybe a pale blue or pale blue-green thread and some kind of feathery pattern quilting might work for it. I have backing fabric tucked away.

If I had lots of time, space, and money? I'd buy a longarm quilting machine of my own, and learn to use it. I think it would be fun and it would be cool to be able to machine quilt my quilts exactly how I wanted them. I could even do quilts for other people, maybe....but of course I don't have space for a machine, and the really good ones cost about as much as a very basic small car.....and there's a learning curve where it's helpful to have some classes in it.

It IS possible to machine quilt on a home machine, either with a darning foot (and dropped feed dogs - though I'm not sure I can drop the feed dogs on my older machine) or a walking foot (for straight lines, and if I ever quilted a quilt in a grid again, I'd seriously consider doing it that way).

I keep thinking I should pull out some of the many small quilt tops I have hanging around and have a try at machine quilting them. (I could get a darning foot, they're pretty cheap and standard). But it's harder to do really complex "pantograph" type designs on a home machine, and it does tie up your machine until the quilt is done.

I also want to finish up the current Pony this weekend - she has three legs and part of a fourth, so once that's done, it's wings, ears, mane-and-tail, face, and cutie mark.

(I learned something recently I didn't know. There is a horse-grooming practice called Quarter Marks where you comb the hair on the horse's rear flank into a pattern. More can be seen here. I'm guessing Bonnie Zacherle (the person who FIRST came up with My Little Ponies) had to have based cutie marks on that - the name comes from "beauty mark" but I'm sure the concept is that of a quarter mark. (And apparently they weren't called "cutie marks" until a number of years into the franchise).  I had never even SEEN quarter marks until someone brought them up somewhere on Derby Day. I admit I'm not crazy about the name "cutie marks" - it's a little twee - so now I can think of them as "quarter marks" if I want to.)