Quilting my Magic Carpet Quilt

I am still working on my Magic Carpet quilt which I pattern tested for Christina Cameli.  I am calling mine "Floating" because I love how the blocks really float with the extra border.  (For more information on how I altered her pattern, see this post.)

It is coming along slowly but surely.  I am custom quilting it with a different design in each "square."  I have decided to use a lot of designs from her two books.  (With some other personal favorites added in.)

The first thing I did was go through Step-by-Step Free-Motion Quilting and draw every single design.  (More than 80).  I drew each in about a 4.5 inch area.  Because the designs in her book build off of the same basic shapes, I found that the more of them I drew the easier they all became.

I believe that it helps to draw your quilting designs the same scale you would quilt them, so I sectioned off areas on my white board the same size as my blocks with painter's tape.  I draw designs on my whiteboard before quilting them.

In the lower left section you can see a leafy design, which I then quilted.

Drawing on paper (all at once), then drawing a design on the whiteboard immediately before quilting helped a lot.  But for some of the more familiar designs, I have skipped drawing on the whiteboard for the sake of time.  I estimate there will be about 18 hours of free-motion-quilting on this quilt.  It took five hours to quilt square spirals in all of the black areas, and each column is taking about an hour.  I am having to take more breaks while quilting, because I am feeling it more in my shoulders on this quilt.  I wonder if that is because I am quilting more densely than I normally do.  But I am loving how it is turning out.

This is the first big quilt I have quilted on my machine since it was serviced, and sadly there was black grease on the needle bar which I didn't see.  Some of it ended up on my quilt.  I tested Zout (which is supposed to be good for grease) on a scrap to see if the grease would wash out , but it only lightened it.  Do you have any suggestions?

I have more of this pink fabric, so I might just unpick it and replace it.  A big thanks goes to Cheetah who figured out what the black stuff was.  I have cleaned off my needle bar and now know to check it to prevent further grease spots.

I hope to have this finished in time for the Blogger's Quilt Festival starting next week.

XX,
Jasmine

P.S.  I will be linking up with some of the fun parties on my sidebar.  There is something fun for every day of the week.