This past week has been busy with my parents coming to visit for a few days and the boys off school for mid-winter break (something I'd never heard of before coming to Washington.) We ate out with my parents a couple times, and went to the science museum; the 3D movie we saw was pretty good! And on Friday I ran all over town with the kids. I wanted to check out this one thrift store that turned out to be really stinky so we went to another tried-and-true thrift store in another part of town. I got the Footloose soundtrack on CD for $3 and we found some like-new jeans for kid #1 so it was a good thing we went.
My parents took some baby gifts back to Utah for my brother and sister-in-law and their sweet new baby girl. She's not even a month old; I'm pretty proud of myself for finishing her baby quilt so soon. Here it is, my first zigzag quilt:
I asked my sister-in-law, Laura, what she might be interested in for this baby's quilt and she said she liked purple and green and butterflies and dragonflies. I didn't have any butterfly or dragonfly fabric on hand but was able to find some good greens, purples, and a little pink to put this quilt together. For the quilting, I did stippling in the colored zigzags, and straight lines in the white. I have since learned that I can loosen my presser foot pressure *even more* than I did for this quilt and it takes away all shifting issues. I am still kind of a beginner as far as any kind of straight line quilting goes.
Oh, and if you want to make a similar quilt, I used 5.5" squares and made them into half-square-triangles with the drawing the line down the middle method. I didn't trim the squares at all. This quilt ended up slightly larger than 36" x 44".
I have big plans this week including dentist appointments, starting the search for an orthodontist, and getting my Swoon quilt top all put together. I'll share my progress on that soon, maybe tomorrow even! Hope you're having a good Sunday.
I love the grunge fabric (the yellow there if you don't know what I mean) that's in all of the Basic Grey fabric lines. So pretty. They have a really good green in this line, too.
Here are the 4 blocks I've finished so far:
I like them better together than individually. I'm working on 5 and 6 today.
Hi friends! Hope you are having a good weekend. I have been working on some gifts that I can't share here yet, but will soon! And I've started my swoon quilt. Here are the first two blocks:
I'm using the Curio fabric line by Basic Grey, and have the fabrics picked out for the next two blocks. I want to have a smaller finished quilt (the pattern makes an 80" x 80" quilt), so I resized the blocks to 18" instead of 24".
Also, I finished up my mermaid swoon pillow yesterday:
I just finished it up with a simple envelope back, but with a double layer of fabric (unquilted) for the back pieces to make it a little sturdier. It looks really cute on my little girl's bed.
I'm hoping to get back to free motion quilting my king size quilt again this week. My wrist has been sore and I've been kind of waiting, hoping for it to feel better. I don't want to aggravate it with too much quilting.
Thanks to everyone who participated in Focus on Free Motion Quilting last month! I really appreciate my 4 guest bloggers and the sponsors, along with those of you who read along and commented. I was excited to see the completed projects posted in the link-up and had my son put some numbered papers in a bowl to draw the winners. And here they are:
Prize #1, 4 Cones of Essential Pro Thread in Natural from Connected Threads goes to #6, Storied Yarns
Prize #2, Hawthorne Threads $50 Gift Certificate goes to #3, Pat in Oregon
Prize #3, Fat Quarter Shop $50 Gift Certificate goes to #5, Beth
Prize #4, Fat Quarter Shop $50 Gift Certificate goes to #1, Richard of Richard Quilts
Prize #5, Fat Quarter Shop $50 Gift Certificate goes to #7, Sonia
I will be emailing all winners immediately after publishing this post to get your contact info for the sponsors. Thanks again and keep quilting!
I can't believe it's already the end of January! I hope you've enjoyed my Focus on Free Motion Quilting posts, and that you've taken some time to practice your free motion quilting this month.
I worked some more on my Mermaid Swoon pillow block, and got the quilting finished.
I decided to quilt the rest of the main (outer) part of the block with the curved outline stitching I started with, and then I did some more detailed stitching in the center square. You can click on the photo above to see it on flickr if you want a closer look. It's definitely not perfect, but I'm planning on practicing this type of quilting some more and I have faith that I'll improve over time :).
This photo (above) shows the orange/turquoise plaid that I'm going to use for the back of the pillow. It's from Connecting Threads, and I think it's a pretty good match. I might use it for binding, too. Maybe on the bias?
So now it's time for you to show off your free motion quilted projects! Here are the rules:
*Post a link to a blog post or flickr photo showing a free motion quilted project you finished this month. The project can be something that was started earlier than this month.
*Link to a specific blog post, not your blog's main page. (Click on the title of the blog post to get to the page for that post.)
*The link-up will be open until 10 p.m. (Pacific time) on February 1, and prizes will be drawn (and posted on my blog) with the help of the random number generator on February 2.
Here are the prizes:
One set of four cones of their Essential Pro polyester thread in Natural from Connecting Threads.
Links to all of the blog posts in this series are located in the "Focus on Free Motion Quilting" tab below my blog header image.
Today I'm excited to share a post from Candy Glendening of Candied Fabrics. Here she is!
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I'm so happy that Vicki asked me here to share my take on
"Focus on Free Motion"! What I want to show you is how my free motion
quilting has evolved in the past 5 years. I spent a good 5-10 years BEFORE that
learning how to Free Motion quilt like this:
Also in those early years I also evolved from a traditional
style quilter to working with my own hand dyed fabrics and making quilts that
come from me, rather than a pattern. The fabric that I dye has a luscious
visual texture that I really want to emphasize, and I realized that I didn't
want to cover that texture up with a whole 'nother layer of texture via the
quilting. So I began trying to figure out how to do that. One of my
transitional pieces is this "Falling Leaves" quilt:
I'm using free motion quilting as a line to outline the tree
and leaves, giving it a "sketchy" style that I admire in artists who
combine water color and pen and ink - with a wash of color underneath a
sketched shape. I really liked working in this style, but at this point, I
couldn't bear to not use my "fancy" free motion work at all, I'd
worked so hard to learn how to do it! My hope was that using it this way, as a
smaller part of a larger whole, I could allow the free motion quilting pattern
shine when I did use it.
Although I like “Falling Leaves”, I ended up not doing much
more work combining the two styles of quilting. Instead, I became more and more
enamored of that strong line created by retracing my quilting line 2, 3 or 4
times, not following the same line each time but missing it on purpose: what I
now call Free Motion Machine Sketching. After using this style in many many
small art quilts…
I looked for a way to emphasize this sketching even more.
What is beautiful, worthy of contemplation, perfect and imperfect at the same
time? Flowers! I started FMMS flowers and leaves a couple of years ago, and
this is a subject that I have only scratched the surface of!
I sell my work online, and also at local art festivals. In
both places, I talk about how I do what I do, but have found that a moving
picture is worth 1000 words! Here’s a video of me doing some Free Motion
Quilting:
and one of me Free Motion Machine Sketching:
Believe me when I say that I can NOT sketch with a
pen/pencil AT ALL! When I want to sketch a new flower, I just take a quick look
at the species I want to sketch (usually a Google image search), grab a scrap
quilting sandwich and give it a whirl. Usually after one or two tries, I’ve got
the shape I want to sketch worked out and I’m ready to go!
Here’s a quilt I made last summer that features some of my
favorite botanical sketches:
There you have it - Free Motion Machine Sketching! I’ve been
sketching flowers for a couple of years now, and I don’t see myself stopping
any time soon!
I hope this is provided you all a peek into yet another type
of free motion quilting. Vicki, this is a genius idea, and all your “Focus on
Free Motion” posts are going to be great references for lots of quilters for a
long time to come!
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Thanks again, Candy! Your free motion sketching is such a unique and beautiful approach to textile art and quilting; I'm so glad you shared this with us! I might need to make my own botanical sketch quilt one of these days (some of you might not know that I was a botany major and studied the ecology of a rare plant in college.) Please visit Candy's website and her shop to find out more about the things she makes AND don't forget to check out her brand new fabric dyeing e-course!
I hope you are almost ready to share your finished free-motion quilted projects on January 31, which is next Tuesday. You'll need to link to a finished, free motion quilted project that was completed this month. Prizes will be drawn randomly later next week. Thanks to the sponsors who are providing our prizes!
Links to all of the blog posts in this series are located in the
"Focus on Free Motion Quilting" tab below my blog header image.
So, I've been thinking about making a Swoon quilt. I want my quilt to be smaller than the 80" square quilt you'd get if you followed the official pattern, so I did some drawing and figuring and tried out an 18" version of the block (the one in the pattern is 24").
It turned out ok; there were some cutting/calculation errors but got it figured out. I don't super-love the color combination--adding a colored binding around the edge might help with that, I think. I'm going to make this one into a pillow, after I quilt it some more. I've been feeling a little crummy and all I've done so far on quilting this is the curvy outline stitching, just on the white sections. I'm not very good at it, yet, but it's something I want to practice. This is one of the techniques discussed in Diane Gaudynski's Guide to Machine Quilting. I'm not sure how I will quilt the colored segments of this block--do you have any suggestions?
Oh yeah, I caught the backing fabric in my quilting, look:
Have you ever done that? I've done it before. Oh well. I'm just going to cut the excess backing fabric away from the stitching and pull out the threads of the fabric piece that's caught in the quilting.
Are you almost ready for our end-of-the-month roundup of free motion quilted projects? (And the prize drawing?) What have you been working on?
Thanks to the Focus on Free Motion Sponsors! (only one more week until the link-up!)
