From Idea to Actually Getting It Down On Fabric

Working on the November 2015 FMQ challenge that is held over at Quiltshopgal. I am using the Accuquilt GO die "Heatherfeather" from Sarah Vedeler for this challenge ...finally! (purchased this over a year ago and have not used it yet)

Here is the idea

All cut out and ready to go. As I used two different colours I had enough to make an identical second arrangement for the back but then started playing around a bit with the leftover shapes

This little arrangement looked nice however after having used up some of those shapes to practice my applique skills on (which were very rusty indeed), I settled on another arrangement for the back.
Had a lot of fun playing around with this...there are many different arrangements you can come up with from this one die.

Spent quite some time sharpening my skills using the satin stitch around the applique shapes and also finally conquered the tapering function on my machine (see previous post)

Applique for the front of the pillow all done

 

Arrangement for the back of the pillow

This has taken me a very long time and was a lot harder than I had anticipated...mainly because I do not do applique very often. The first few shapes that I practiced on looked fairly rough and I realised that I had to literally go... stitch...move over a bit...stitch...move over...there was no way of hurrying this along if you wanted to get the curves nice and round.








I am now at the stage of stitching around it with a 100wt Invisafil thread (my new favourite thread replacing the clear Monofilament thead) and then finally I can get cracking on the freemotion-quilting. I am thinking plumes for the background fill in a blend in neutral thread to give it texture. Have recently bought Patsy Thompson's new Craftsy class " Ultimate Free-motion Feathers" which is full of FMQ goodness including a section on "plumifying" the background. Highly recommended!

Remains to be seen whether I can finish this in time.

Linking up to Freemotion By The River

Karin