FMQ Fun

I have been working on the March FMQ Challenge hosted by Quiltshopgal. This months' expert is Patsy Thompson. I thought that I might post about my progress otherwise my link up post is just going to get too long at the end of the month.

I am an avid follower of Patsy Thompson and have talked about her DVDs previously. I acquired the feather series some time ago and have been hooked ever since, particularly on the hyperquilting. In trying to work out what to sew, I went on Patsy's blog and instantly was inspired to try her pillow design. It featured a beautiful trapunto wreath. Now here was a challenge...I have not done a lot of trapunto and thought this was a good opportunity to give it another crack. So basically I am just a bit of a copycat this month in terms of design.
Basically used what I had on hand and traced the design on my square. Had I considered this a bit more, I would have left out the middle section of the wreath...more on that later

Stitched out design

Batting and thin interfacing behind the wreath

In-lining

I placed some wafer-thin interfacing behind the batting as just stitching through the batting was a bit tricky tension-wise...the interfacing fixed this. Trimmed the batting very carefully, basted it and got to work on outlining the wreath with invisible thread, following Patsy's instruction on her blog. All good, except that I now noticed that the inside plumes were puffing out like no tomorrow. This made sense, given that I had not done any in-lining in there...yep, something to think about beforehand.

As you may have noticed, I changed the pearls to a lighter colour...the red ones I had done before were just really sloppy. Tried to be quick and just sewn them in there, even though I knew they would look better if I did half circles first and then complete them on the second run...so I did them properly second time around. The outlining of the plumes was interesting...used invisible thread as Patsy had done and realized that I would have to jump sections if I did not want to backtrack on the invisible thread. Bit of a hassle and my jumping turned out a bit untidy on the back and the fat plumes in the middle were a bit of a challenge! But the beast got tamed and it looks sort of alright.

Learned another thing doing this...my outer circle from which the in-lining was done looks quite untidy (if you look closely) and I realized that I should have stitched slightly off the sewn circle...I think that might look better. Overall though a decent trapunto effort, judging by my previous attempts.

Anyway, finished this today with some echo lines around the circle and then tackled the corners. Used the walking foot for that and then tried something I had not done before...used one of my decorative stitches to put the row of pearls in. The Pfaff machine has a basic circle and with some minor adjustment I was able to make it a bit rounder and smaller to fit exactly into my 1/4in space. The machine backtracks over the circle, so it is quite a heavy stitch and FMQ circles do look a bit better, however just for the texture, this was perfect...finished this in no time at all and now can get back to FMQ the rest.


Linking up to Connie's Freemotion by the River, even though it's Wednesday today however have not linked up anywhere for a while and there is a bit of a Giveaway going on as well as lots to see.

Karin