A Bit Of Practice

I was thinking of doing a bit of rulerwork on the next charity quilt, however when I opened the bundle up it was not what I thought it was. In fact it had whole rows of embroidery on there and no four or nine patch blocks (which it looked like when I first looked at the bundle). As a matter of fact, I am going to take this bundle back to the group as there are a number of problems...the 3 rows of very detailed embroidery is still attached to its stabilizer and sewn to the next pieced section.  The checkerboard rows underneath bulged out to no end because of that. On top of that somebody ironed the embroidery presumably with some steam from above, so it is all crinkled up...I stood there looking at it for a long time, unsure what to do, but decided in the end that that one is not for me. Anyway, that is a different story...

What I was going to try out and show you was something I had seen on Natalia Bonner's YouTube channel. Loved the look of it (you can find it in the Shorts section under the title 'Less is More...Who am I?)...In the video she is stitching out a seemingly very simple design on a quilt that has alternating four patch blocks and white empty blocks. It looks really crisp and fresh and it appealed to me straight away as it is particularly suited for such a simple, yet effective layout.

So I tried this on a piece of scrap fabric to see how easy (or not) it would be to just stitch this out with some rulers and freehand with some minimal marking. Also used this to free up some half filled bobbins and kept going with a bit of a feather spray on top...that bobbin just kept on going! Natalia, of course, is using her new Sway rulers for this task. As I do not have them, I used my trusted small Pro Echo ruler but also the long Bernina ruler which came with the ruler table when I still had the frame. Kept this as a souvenir.

I could have used the longer Bernina ruler for the entire task (except the circle in the middle of the second block) but found that the smaller Pro Echo ruler was more convenient to do some simple curves.

I did this from memory and did some simple Nine Patch blocks when in fact Natalia's demonstration was based on Four Patch blocks as I saw when I watched the video again. Never mind!

My drawn squares were 6in and I was curious how I would go adding the petals around the flower in an orderly way. I made the circle of the flower 2in which in retrospect was a bit too small. Looking back at Natalia's video I reckon the circle is something like 2-1/2in. Not that you have to follow exactly what somebody else does, however I did find my petals a bit too long as it was a harder to keep them nice and straight. The other thing learned was that you should not turn your piece around as you go around the circle. Firstly, you would not be doing that anyway if you have a larger quilt under your machine, but I also found that it messed with my brain. It was far easier to have it not turning and slowly but deliberately move around the circle. 

Turned out ok for very little effort in terms of marking, basically you just need to know where the center of the block is and have a circle guideline for the outside and off you go...easy to do and an effective way to dress up a very traditional layout. While there are a few inconsistencies, I don't think that would feature a lot if you had this design in every alternate block over an entire quilt. I had a bit of uneveness in terms of the size of the petals in the bottom but overall not too bad. If this was a quilt, I would probably leave that and try to do the next one a bit more even.

Also baked a bread while I was doing it, so overall felt very productive that day!

Happy Quilting!

Karin

Edge to Edge Quilting

Could not resist doing a pantograph over a very, very scrappy charity quilt. While I don't normally do this on charity quilts due to the time it takes to do this on a sitdown machine, this quilt literally screamed to have the design put on it. Funny how some quilts do seem to speak to you instantly.

The design I had to do was "Happy Times' by Hermione Agee. It is a 5-1/4in design, however I used a slightly enlarged copy as I already had a roll of that taped together ready for use. I have detailed the process of preparation and quilting it with Golden Threads paper elsewhere on this blog, so I will not go too much into the details again (you can also search my blog using Edge to Edge Quilting and it will bring up a number of posts on the topic).

I did however do something a bit differently this time to speed up the process. Normally I trace every single row with blue water erasable markers, however this time I traced it only once, then laid about 6 rows of paper underneath and stitched through my first row with a bigger sized needle (unthreaded) on the domestic sewing machine. So I had about 7 templates of the design ready to go. Personally I prefer to have the rows traced individually but that does take considerable more time. With the paper that had the design as punctured lines it was marginally harder to see, but also felt a bit more precarious to stitch out...as you are travelling along the line, depending on how accurate you are, you are going to hit the punctured pre-stiched line which will then slightly separate the paper in some places. Not a big problem and makes taking the paper out later easier, but it feels a bit more unsecure as you go along.

Anyway, here are some photos of this beauty...this design is so right for this quilt and gives it a really nice texture on top of securing some of the more precarious seams ( I think this is quite an old quilt top that had a few seams that were coming apart and a bit of fullness in some areas). The thread choice was also interesting as the quilt had a bright red pieced backing. As I am slowly but surely using up some older thread, I chose a red variegated Gutermann 50/3 thread to quilt this out. Was not sure how that would go...I don't often quilt with red thread as they can be a bit finnicky at times in terms of tension (why do I even have this thread in my stash?), however had no issue with it and definitely adds to the 'happy' look of this quilt.

The finished quilt

Close up

The very bright backing

The thread choice was definitely right, even in places where there was a lot of blue fabric. Just looks really cool. Also used the same thread in the bobbin which makes the back of the quilt look great. The variegation is hardly noticeable due to the vibrance of the red fabric.

 This was very enjoyable...love it when it turns out just like you had imagined! I think for the next charity quilt though I will move on to some ruler quilting...something I have seen on Natalia Bonner's YouTube and I just got the quilt for it.

Happy quilting!

Linking up to Finished or Not Finished Friday

Karin