I'm a Polyester Kind of Gal / Beauties Pageant 302

I don’t think much about thread. I’ve been buying the same brand and same weight for years, taking for granted that I could get what I wanted easily and for a fair price. How does the old saying go? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Then I heard news that Joann was closing 500 retail locations. So long, reliable, ubiquitous source of thread! Suddenly, I was open to other options. When Superior Threads offered to send me a few products to try out earlier this year, I jumped at the opportunity.*

So Fine!

One product I played around with is So Fine!, a 50-weight polyester product. I prefer polyester products because they make my machine happy. I sew on a Janome 1600P-QC, a super-fast straight-stitch machine, and she likes polyester. That preference is most apparent during free-motion quilting. For those projects, I often experience fraying and breakage with cotton thread, but polyester works without issues.

I’ve been exclusively piecing and quilting with 40-weight polyester thread for years and years, and I was skeptical of a 50-weight option. (Remember, the smaller the number, the thicker the thread. In other words, a 40-weight thread is thicker than a 50-weight thread.) I really liked it with piecing--the thinner thread made a difference! It wasn’t a night-and-day change, but I noticed that my pieces ironed flatter. 

I also quilted with So Fine! In the past, I’ve argued that a thicker thread is more forgiving, hiding the wobbles of my straight-line quilting better than a thinner thread. I sewed my latest Fire Truck Quilt with Sew Fine! in a pale gray (without marking a single line, I might add), and everything turned out beautifully. Go figure!

Sew Sassy 

The one exception to my long-held polyester-only rule was when I finished bindings by hand. For that, I’ve employed 12-weight cotton thread, and it has worked fine. I was surprised, then, when Sew Sassy, a three-ply 12-weight polyester thread was easier to use. 

With a cotton thread, I have to make sure I don’t cut off a piece longer than 15 or 16 inches: The more the thread is pulled through a quilt sandwich, the more likely the plies will loosen. That wasn’t an issue with the polyester. The integrity of the thread held up despite its travels in and out of the binding of my Windmill Weave project. 

I won’t toss my old cotton 12-weight, but from here on out, I’ll purchase polyester.

 

Metallic

I also requested a gold metallic thread. (How very un-Michelle of me!) When I went to QuiltCon 2025, there was a special exhibit of work from keynote speaker Tara Faughnan, and I was surprised to see occasional quilting lines of metallic gold thread in multiple pieces. I haven’t found the right project for the spool I have on hand, but you’ll be the first to hear about it when I do.

Are there any other polyester fans out there? I’d love to hear your thoughts on when you use different weights. Tell us all about it in the comments! 

* Please note: I received these product free. This post contains my own, unbiased opinion about them.

 

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On Gifting Quilts / Beauties Pageant 301

Over the years, people have inquired about whether I sell my finished quilts. As a policy, I don’t. I choose to gift them to friends and family instead, because it seems like the safer bet. I’d much rather pass my projects on to recipients I know and who are more likely to enjoy them and appreciate my work.

For years, then, the life cycle of my quilts was simple: I would make whatever brought me joy and then decided on a home for a project. This was a fine approach, but in retrospect, there were times when a gifted quilt seemed to fall flat. Maybe the design or palette wasn’t to the recipient’s liking? (That’s understandable, especially with my, at times, limited knowledge of the person’s taste.) Maybe she just wasn’t into having a handmade quilt in her decor? (No judgment! Such people do exist!) 

So I’ve honed my approach. Now I like to accumulate several finished quilts and then ask the recipient to pick her favorite. 

It works! Perhaps the person doesn’t get the sense that this quilt was specifically crafted for her in mind, but she leaves with a useful piece of art that, for whatever reason, speaks to her.

And that’s the process I followed recently to gift eight finished throw-size quilts to teachers who worked with my younger son through middle school.  

I have a friend who follows a similar process with family. She lays out her quilts at a family reunion, and everyone can pick a favorite or two. I conducted my process over email, contacting a few recipients with pictures of my finishes and asking them to pick a quilt before weeding out pictures of the claimed quilts and reaching out to the next small group.

It feels good to gift a quilt, and it feels even better knowing that I’ve increased the likelihood that the quilt will be used and loved by giving the recipient a say in the process.

Pictured here is one of the quilts I passed on to its forever home in the latest round of gifting. The design is Step Dance, from Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts, and it’s a prototype I made years ago, well before I had even decided to write the book.

This project is so old that I have to plumb the depths of my memory (and email folders!) to dig up the details. The fabric is Ava Kate by Carina Gardner for Riley Blake, and Narda Junda of Maz Q’s Sewing and Quilting Studio quilted it for me in a fabulous swirly pantograph. 

(You can see the version I sewed for the book, in a collection by Sweetwater, here.)

The black in this line caught my attention—I love a fabric collection with some unexpected black in it! The striped print was an especially effective addition to the quilt design, because it accentuates the idea of ascending stairs and helped me settle on a name for the pattern.

I was working with a fat quarter bundle for this project and used as much of it as I could, even piecing the leftover blue bits together to make a scrappy binding.

What do you do with your finished projects? Do you, too, pass them on to family and friends? Do you enjoy the thrill of selling them online or at craft fairs? Or do you fold them up and put them in a closet, a dilemma to solve another day? 

 

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Kitchen Table Quilting's Fire Truck Quilt, Again/ Beauties Pageant 300

That dazed look on my face? That’s a sure sign of summer. I’ve been driving kids around, prepping for road trips, and keeping everyone busy. It’s starting to feel as if I’m not having a summer … Summer is having me! 



It’s a minor miracle, then, that I have a finish to share. This is the Fire Truck Quilt from a free tutorial by Erica Jackman of Kitchen Table Quilting. I made it for a very special one-year-old. I hope he loves it!

Before you balk at the idea of sewing a pixelated quilt, with all its little pieces and seams, this project was fun and surprisingly fast. In fact, this is the second Fire Truck quilt I’ve made over the years. (See the first one here.) 

What makes this quilt worthy of a second go-round? Aside from the fact that it’s crazy cute, it’s a fabulous venue for busting through scraps. I counted 24 different reds in this project, all of which came from my scrap bin or hoard of red fat quarters. 

Amassing the required number of red squares wasn’t challenging, but assembling the grays were. My stash contains brownish grays and purpley grays and grays with green undertones. I homed in on the shade of gray that was the most prevalent and ran with it, even breaking open a jelly roll and cutting the strips into 2.5-inch squares to meet the necessary number.

The piecing went faster with this second version. Because the design has so few colors, I was able to mindlessly chain-piece the reds and grays into chunks of four squares. From there, I would lay out a section of the quilt and sew it before moving on to the next. 

I pressed my seams to one side for this project. Naive Past Michelle thought she was doing herself a favor by pressing everything open in an effort to produce a flat and easy-to-quilt top. Present Michelle had no time for such foolishness! Pressing to the side allowed me to nest my seams, which made the process go faster and resulted in a top that was just as easy to quilt. 

I was glad I didn’t wait until the top was finished before selecting a backing fabric. I found the most perfect print for the back from On the Go by Stacy Iest Hsu and was able to steer the palette—especially the colors in the windshield—to coordinate. 

How is the summer going for you? Are you finding the time to sew or out and about, enjoying all that the season has to offer? (Friends in the southern hemisphere, I’d love to hear from you, too!)   

 

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