Batik Disappearing Nine Patch Quilt. 12.12.21

Yesterday I sat down at the sewing machine and put together all of the quilt blocks for this batik fabric quilt. I arranged, rearranged, re-rearranged the blocks over the last few days. It's nothing like what I thought two weeks ago. I think it's actually coming together and nicer than I initially thought. I started this quilt in Jan but was sidetracked by medical issues which are now better.

This is a situation where having the Iphone and Ipad helped a lot. I kept taking photos so I would know how it looked and how to put together. The i-phone camera over-emphasizes the contrast, so dark patterns all look darker, and light patterns look almost shocking white. That does help in a way, because it identifies unwanted and unintended patterns when the quilt blocks play with the eye. I used post-its to mark how I liked it, but used the I-pad more to guide based on how I finally arranged the blocks. This is how they looked before sewing together.

Before doing all that, I put together the Morse sewing machine and got it running. I took a while to get used to it but it is a lot of fun. The stitching is quite different from modern machines. I think I'll replace the inner light with an LED like I did the Kenmore. Then I took the Kenmore machine apart, blew out the lint using canned keyboard cleaner compressed air spray, oiled, and it ran like new. It's interesting how much nicer it sounds. I have a pdf of the manual which helps a lot.