Edge-to-Edge Quilting

Have finished another charity quilt, this time though with an edge-to-edge design. Could not resist, using the beautiful 'Ambrosia' design by Hermione Agee. It is a feather design about 6.5in wide. Given that I am now back on the sit down machine I had to use my trusted Golden Threads paper to draw this one out, row by row, then align each row to the next and slowly working my way across the quilt. This is probably where I most miss the frame...really enjoyed that on the frame. Mind you there is equally lots of alignment that you have to do on a frame. I feel the real difference is in the time it takes to take all that paper out of the quilt which I usually do as I go along. The stitching out takes very little time as the design is bigger and flowing nicely with bigger open curves so you do quilt them in BSR1 with a little bit of speed. 

The charity quilt lent itself beautifully to this design. Old-fashioned floral type fabrics in a simple railroad like set up.

Also, this quilt had cotton batting for a change which I really enjoyed.

Some closeups

And then I got side tracked...

Started knitting a little jumper for the grandchild. As so often with me I had my heart set on a top down rolled collar jumper pattern. You can find that pattern on Ravelry under Top Down Roll Raglan by Melinda Goodfellow.

I used to be a very prolific knitter when I was younger, so went ahead to re-work the whole pattern to suit my wool which had a different gauge. This took me ages to do...

Started knitting...this is really quite an easy jumper to knit, but boy I am out of practice. It is knitted top down, then split for the arms and continued in the round, so really very simple. When it came to the arms I started to have some issues with having big unsightly holes from the stitches stretching. Was not impressed and had to re-do this a number of times. Also had to use DPNs for the arms which was a bit of a hassle as the arms were so small. Lucky I had done some sock knitting in recent years, so at least that part worked out well.

Eventually though this got done and came out very cute. Even my sizing almost worked out. I was aiming for a 2 yr old jumper but with my re-calculations it came out at a maybe 18 mths old jumper, so the child will be able to wear it this winter. Bonus!

Took me the longest time though...still got more of that green wool left and will be on the lookout for another jumper in a bigger size.

But for now it is back to quilting for me. This is what is on my list:

- got a whole container full of charity quilts, 

-some new I spy 10in fabric squares for an I spy quilt, 

-another 10 blocks for my scrappy Courthouse blocks quilt

-got the batting for a jelly roll rug

-...and several finished quilt tops in the cupboard waiting patiently to be done!

Happy Quilting!

Karin

Overall Feather Design

Well, I am back on my sitdown and very happy. Cleaned up the sewing room and made use of the now empty spare room to put the computer in. Feeling less crowded and things are much better organised.

Started on my workshop sample, just trialling different things that I want to cover in class. The sample gives me an idea on how long it approximately takes to stitch out the class content and also what size of practice samples should be cut out for class

I got side tracked, of course...started playing with rulers, tried different things, realised I had not covered what to do when your space is much bigger than you comfortably can stitch out. Overall very useful which will be used to finish off my handout. The class has now been scheduled for November so I am now well ahead ( which is handy as we are having overseas visitors at the end of July). Also found a new favourite feather border arrangement.

Its the last one in the lines of feather shapes. I think I took that inital feather arrangement from the 'Ambrosia' pantograph and then just continued with the same shapes in an arbitrary playful way. Looks quite nice and helps me to quilt in a little more informal way which I usually find quite hard. It seems that my muscle memorey is hardwired to do really formal feathers and any deviation is almost painful to execute. That was really fun to stitch out.

After that I continued on my mission to put an overall feather design on one of the charity quilts. I had practised this a bit both on the frame and now on the sitdown after seeing it on the website of StitchedbySusan. Like the texture of that design and thought that it could be potentially an easy way to get some charity quilts done.

So this is stitched edge-to-edge rather than allover, meaning I am going from left to right and then back again. This was certainly a challenge and I thought for a moment about doing an allover design - in which case I would have stitched this out in quarters turning the quilt clockwise after each quarter. However that would have meant that the feather plumes would go in different directions and I was not sure whether that would look any good so I stuck with the idea of edge-to-edge.

I found going from left to right easier than going the other way. Started in the middle of the quilt finishing off one half and then turned the quilt to do the other half. Must say, initially struggled a bit as I am also quilting on a larger scale but soon got into the swing of things. Happy to say that I did not get stuck anywhere and was able to move along quite quickly from row to row.

Came out ok, but not sure whether this is almost a bit much. It certainly has got a nice feel to it and looking at individual sections is lovely, even though the overall picture looks a bit crowded. I think I have another few scrappy quilts in my bundle of charity quilts. Might try it again maybe paying a bit more attention to the scale as some of my shapes are a bit irregular ( like instead of getting stuck I would make really long and big shapes to fill out a space 😆). Good experiment...took two afternoons to completion, so a good option for those charity quilts. Mind you, also could see this with a nice pantograph stitched allover!

Well, we shall see what I feel like next.

Karin