Memorial Day goodies

Red, white and blue.  Does that combination do it to you like it does it to me?  This is the second of Sue B's friends' quilts, and it's very nicely made.  Corners match.  The quilt is squared up. Seams are ironed flat.  It's exactly the kind of quilt that makes me happy to load and work on.  I finished quilting it yesterday, trimmed and photographed it today and got it into the mail in time to go out this afternoon.  Mission accomplished.

Now here's a little treat for you longarmers.  You know how the unused portion of your leader flaps in the wind as you are turning your take up bar to move on to the next section?  And if you don't smooth out those leader ends, they end up getting all folded over and sort of snarled up between the backing bar and the belly bar?  Well, here are some useful little items.  They are cuffs that fit over your bars to hold those loose ends tightly against the bar.

Essentially, they are thin conduit tubing that has been cut open and has had the edges smoothed.  I looked for PVC tubing or other plastic conduit so I could have DH make some of these for me, but I couldn't find the appropriate thickness.  It has to be thin enough and springy enough to slip over the bars and leaders.  So I ended up buying these at a quilt show.

Here's what I like about them:  they hold the excess leader nicely against the bars.  Here's what I don't like: at the end of the quilt, when you often want to move that last row up from the belly bar so that it's more in the middle of your machine's throat space, the leaders unroll to accommodate you.  With these plastic cuffs in place, the leader can't do that, and you have to push them off the leaders and onto the bar. 

One last thing to share with you.  This video is AMAZING!  Enjoy Toby Keith and the aircraft at one of our Air Force bases:  USA