Side Tracked Once Again - To Do Tuesday 25/1/23

I am absolutely hopeless when it comes to staying on task!

I was working through my list for the To Do Tuesday Linky Party when I got what I call the 'design bug'!

It started when I pinned and basted this cute little charity quilt from the Orange Tree Quilters Group. Absolutely fell in love with this even though it had a lot of very crooked blocks and was absolutely not straight. Loved the design and the colours they used. 

In looking at this I decided that I needed to do an allover design on this. Would have loved to do an edge to edge design but given this a charity quilt, this seemed too time consuming, so it had to be something that I could do freehand. Feeling absolutely bored with the allover meander, I thought some swirls and feathers would be nice and promptly made up a design that including both. 

So I started practicing

I am pretty good at freemotionquilting, but obviously muscle memory takes more than a few hours or even days...this was certainly a good reminder. No matter what I did, my brain would not allow me to freely travel across an area without getting lost as the swirls would constantly throw me into a direction where I did not want to be. It truly is a matter of sustained practice over time. However, as I was doing this over and over again, I noticed that I was starting to work out how to travel in one row...and that is when I truly got into it! Got my Ipad out and started drawing...

Over the next few days, yes days...I developed my own pantograph design

Why on earth did I do this...no idea, but I got hugely excited about this and felt like sharing that little achievement. The design itself is not finished...some lines need tweaking and my overlap is somewhat dodgy, so there are changes that will have to be made for it to become usable, but wow, this was a lot of brain teasing fun. I am planning to tidy that up over the coming weeks so that I am able to use this on one of my quilts. Very curious on how this will quilt out in terms of texture.

For my little charity quilt though I decided in the end to do an allover meander as I have got more pressing items on my list that need finishing and no joke...days had passed since I basted that quilt. Looking at it again I thought that the meander would be the best design to grab some of the fullness in certain blocks and distribute that around a bit and with the frequent direction changes in the design it did just that and it turned out beautifully. I do think that the meander design is severely underrated...such a good design to use when you have a bit of a disaster of a quilt in terms of the piecing. The alarming areas of fullness I had in some areas of that quilt do not feature at all after the meander and look all part of the overall picture. Definitely was the right choice!

Well, my tasks from last week were:

- to finish the pattern write up and put it up as a new listing in my Etsy shop✅

- to cut out the material for a new pattern ready to be constructed; the pattern is ready to go in EQ8, just a matter of putting it all together - partially done

- to pin and baste another charity quilt (I think I got two more to go in the bag that I picked up last year from the Orange Tree Quilters group)✅ 

So, for the coming week I have set myself the following tasks:

- to start working on a new pattern, i.e. get off the computer and do some sewing!

- to pin and baste another of those charity quilts and maybe even get it quilted.

Linking up to To Do Tuesday #4 over at Quilt Schmilt 

Karin