Quilt Along #37- Jagged Lines

It's Quilt Along #37 on Leah Day's Quilt Along Wednesdays. The task for this week was another edge-to-edge design called Jagged Lines.

I went into the sashing of my 'practice quilt' for that. Again I struggled with quilting-in-the-ditch on top and on the bottom, but overall it turned out alright. I just have to accept, it is white thread and I will not have perfection here.

It was very late but I really felt like doing some Flowing Lines and tackled the border. This was also an exercise in using my new Freemotion Sensormatic Echo Quilting foot for the machine ...I posted about it here...if you are curious about what that looks like. Amazing contraption.

This time I paid much more attention to how I was stitching the lines (had some pretty odd shapes when I first tried it). As the border is bigger it was much easier to execute as I could do more sweeping type movements. Also realised that the fabric itself has some flowing lines on it which I actually had not realised before. I did not fill the gaps...this is purely due to how the 'practice quilt' is starting to feel  in terms of its density. Somehow I decided that Flowing Lines in itself would be the right match for the rest of the quilting (and I was right...it feels exactly right).

White thread on dark blue...would not have done this a year ago.

I am very happy with this. The lines look great and the Echo Quilting foot helped with making them pretty consistent. I left bigger gaps to keep the border from becoming too dense.

I did not turn the corners, but went straight across as I am not sure what else I am going to do with the borders. Must say, I really like the look of this.

Questions:

- (apologies if this was addressed before) I started quilting the border from the middle out to the right, facing the border and having all the bulk behind the machine. That, of course, meant that I then had to turn the quilt to complete the other side, this time with the bulk of the quilt in my lap. This was very awkward and created a few hassles with just having to manage the bulk. What is the best way to go about this?
I thought about sewing it side ways but thought better of it as I have a fair bit of compaction going on on the quilt and I thought that this could lead to some distortion in the border.

- starting to get a bit worried about the compaction...at the moment I am quilting wherever I fancy as the quilt is secured by quilting in-the-ditch, however after I had done the top border, I wondered whether I now should continue with the side borders rather than doing the bottom border first (I was thinking of doing Jagged Lines in the bottom to match the top a bit). The quilt itself is pulling in the batting and the border is starting to crinkle (as is the sashing).


Time to link up to Leah Day's Quilt Along Wednesdays

Until next time

Karin