The flowering snowball is finished.  I’m so tickled with how this quilt turned out and can’t wait to start on the next one.  The quilting went really quickly and I love the old fashioned look and feel of the pick stitching along with the 30’s style fabrics.

As for the tip, when I started doing the quilting on this one, I knew I wanted my stitches to be roughly 1/4″, with 1/4″ spacing and was trying to figure out how to get fairly close (knowing that eyeballing the stitch length and spacing probably wouldn’t work very well for me).  First I tried marking 1/4″ from the tip of the needle with a black fine point Sharpie, which I then lit on fire hoping to heat set it well enough to last.  It lasted for a while but eventually it started rubbing off and getting harder and harder to see.  So, rather than do that again, I just got the Dremel tool out and scratched the needle shank 1/4″ from the tip.  Now while I know that sounds strange and probably isn’t something most quilters would suggest, it worked like  a charm.  As the needle passes through the fabric, you can feel that scratch on the shank of the needle catch a touch on the fabric and automatically know that you’re at your 1/4″ mark.  While I wouldn’t necessarily suggest using this trick on anything other than cotton fabrics, for fear that it might cause a snag or pull in the fabric, I had no problems at all with this issue on cotton.  While my stitches aren’t perfect and I wouldn’t want anyone to take a ruler to them, they also aren’t supposed to be perfect on this type of stitch so it’s all good!!