Machine quilting between forest fire updates

Have you heard about the terrible forest fire here? It started on Thursday morning. 42 Prison Service officer cadets were killed when their bus got trapped by the fire-they were on their way to help evacuate people. A police car following was also caught by the fire. Several people are in the hospital in critical condition.

Kibbutz Beit Oren was completely destroyed. Yesterday, help arrived from all over. Cyprus, Greece and Turkey were the first to arrive with large fire fighting planes. This morning I heard that a really large plane arrived from Russia. With this help the fire fighters started to get the fire under control yesterday but during the night, when the planes couldn't fly, the wind came up again and by this morning two towns were under threat.

This is not the usual season for forest fires-let alone the worst fire ever-as its supposed to be the rainy season. We had one small rain in October and nothing since. The weather forecast is for scattered rainfall tomorrow...I just hope it rains up north here. We're east of the fire and don't even see a hazy horizon-just a hot sun and clear blue sky.

Between watching news reports, I've been doing a little machine quilting on the drunkard's path quilt. I decided to do a hanging diamond grid on the yellow...that's done by sewing parallel vertical lines (I'd done that already) and then crossing them with 45 degree diagonal lines. I used a Hera Marker to mark the lines-it just creates a crease in the fabric. It works great on a quilt sandwich...when I first got it I tried to mark just the top-that doesn't work.
I sewed each row with my walking foot. When I got to a white area-I finished off but didn't pull and cut the threads. I lifted the presser foot and moved past the white area and started again...you can see the line of thread across the white area-look on the far left of the white. After I finished a line, then I went back and cut the threads, front and back and started on the next line.
I used the little guide that fits on my walking foot too...sometimes I'm a little obsessive. For the first set of plain vertical lines, I just used the guide but I was nervous about doing that on the diagonal...for one thing-the white areas would pop in at different heights so I didn't always have a starting spot from the previous line. I just eye balled it for the vertical lines but it actually was easier with the markings.
Here its sewn...pretty cool! I've always wanted to do a quilt with a hanging diamonds grid-I can't believe how many long-time goals are getting completed with this quilt. Now I have all those threads to bury...