Still Working On Background Fills

Not much happening on this side of the globe.

Still working away on my background filler project. As usual, it is much bigger and time consuming than I had originally thought. However, I am getting a lot of practice in with some of the more unfamiliar shapes which is great.

I think that I now can do these little round flower shapes in my sleep. Also discovering which ones really flow for me and which ones to maybe leave for smaller areas. Definitely have overdone the pebbling a bit, I think, but have decided since then that this was meant to look like that...think forest floor or similar. We have had another lesson in the Breaking Boundaries class with Bethanne Nemesh since then, so there are even more fillers to explore. For now though I am going to keep it to some more floral motifs and possibly on the side some sort of straight line design before moving on to the second half of this piece. I have about the same area to fill in the second half and need to think that through for a bit.

Must say that this has been somewhat more challenging than I thought. I am using a wool batting which is giving me lots of nice puff, however it has also meant that I have to pay attention to in what order I quilt the various areas and has meant that I needed to break thread more often than I thought to cater for the compaction that is happening. I have found myself a couple of times in areas that had an alarming amount of puff which than needed to be quilted down and distributed evenly across. Definitely something I have to watch out for.

In other news, I have held my first freemotionquilting class the other day. That was very nice and very enjoyable. Had a lovely group of ladies who were keen to learn. It was actually very interesting to watch them quilt... some slow, some fast, a few ladies could freemotionquilt already a little bit while for some it was completely unfamiliar. I have freemotionquilted now for well over ten years and I was surprised at how much I could pick up just from watching them. We started with allover designs which are always a bit hard to do, especially if you are totally unfamiliar with the design. They all had a good go at it. The next class is background fillers which will be just a little bit more challenging as we will have to go more slowly and deliberately. Hopefully the ladies will throw in some practice in between. It will definitely test their patience and even more show how important sustained practice is. There is just no other way really of learning freemotionquilting unfortunately. Good fun ahead!

Karin