Getting brave and bragging

First, the bravery part. I loaded a charity quilt on the frame today as I was hosting bee for the first time since I bought the HQ. I thought some of my beemates might want to take a look/give her a try so I wanted to have something on it to play with. I went back down tonight and got the top minus 3/4 of the border completed. Now here's the brave part...I turned off the stitch regulator. This is the first time I've done so and I was a little afraid of what might happen. Amazingly, I started to get comfortable with it pretty quickly. Although I am confident it would win no prizes for the quilting, I am pretty happy with my first free motion/unregulated experiment on the HQ. Here's a couple pictures, with hopes that you can see the meandering closely enough (and if anyone knows how to get good closeup pictures of the quilting, could you please leave me a comment?).

I think I will have to see if I can adjust my table height though. I would like to get it a few inches taller, as I found myself leaning over a lot and my neck and shoulders are feeling it a little right now.

Now on to the bragging part...and this is not about my stuff, but my mom's. She showed the bee two of her quilts today and I am going to post pictures of them here, because I think they are two of her best works yet. She has been working on the lighthouse quilt since before Jack was born. The detail on it is just amazing. I don't know if she's going to let me quilt it or not!

The second quilt is an Edyta Sitar pattern that was originally done in batiks at The Back Door, one of our favorite shops. Mom loved the pattern and decided it would be a great way to show off all the orientals that she's been collecting and loves so much. I think she's right. Just a little bragging on my mom since she doesn't blog!