Lana Lemur...Still Going

I took a break from my Lana Lemur quilt for about a week but got going again on it this week. Certainly one of my more crazy ideas...this is taking forever!

This is how far I got

So close and yet so far away. 

Like I said before Claudia Pfeil made this look very easy and relatively fast doing it on her longarm in her video Claudia's P(Fillers). I am really dragging my feet with this one. Not sure whether this is because I had no specific plan on how to go about it and have to frequently stop and think about what to do next or it just does take longer on a sitdown.

In thinking about this the last few days I thought that this approach to filling a background is maybe better suited to a longarm machine where you can see a section in its entirety rather than having it all scrunched up and going a bit more blind...not sure about that one. I found that as I was going along switching from one design to the next I was often not looking at the overall picture and some of my transitions are not that great because of that. I thought that it would be easier to have a whole section in front of you to really concentrate on making a visually appealing transition. Could just be that I am a bit tired of it.

Never mind...it will get done, just have to make a concentrated effort this week. Got a few more circles left and need to find something to fill the circles with which should not be too difficult. Just looked a little bit earlier on  Natalie Bonner's Let's Stitch A Block A Day series which is an excellent resource in terms of designs to use for blocks. Will try out a few of her designs in the remaining circles. Also have a few more lines to quilt which should reduce the area to be quilted significantly, so hopefully I can knock this off this week.

Some close ups

Not too bad...I quite like my little circle motif between the lemurs...very puffy.

Linking up to Cheeky Cognoscenti's Long Arm Learning Linky Party and Freemotion Mavericks

Karin

WIP

Looking at all the other blogs I almost feel a bit slack...not much to show for this week even though I have been consistently working on things. I have spend a considerable amount of time on cutting fabric for my ' Arrangement of Small Pieces Project'...as the name suggests the pieces are rather smallish and I decided to cut them en mass, so that I then can chain-piece units together. I spend about 4 hours cutting last Friday and managed to prepare about 6 blocks ready for sewing. This is not going very fast at all, but accuracy is a must for this block and I just have to keep at it.

My other project for this month is putting together a practice quilt for Leah Day's Quilt Along Wednesdays  . While this may sound a bit crazy I figured that a bit of pain now will make life so much easier later on. By the time we start up again in June I will have 20 square blocks to practice on which theoretically should see me through to the end of the year (give and take a few weeks). This way I can just pull this out for the practice each week and not loose momentum on my other projects,  and it will also give me a visual display of this year's learning.

This is my progress so far. I am very pleased with this as it gives me an excuse to work with almost solid fabric which I love, and it simultaneously tackles the alarming accumulation of fabric in my stash...not that it really made a huge dent but it is a start. The outside border will be dark blue which will be perfect to stitch a fancy border design on once it is all done. So, overall, I am looking forward to this.

Auditioning inner border -had to improvise as I ran out of sashing

Once  this quilt is basted, I will be able to concentrate on finishing my current project and also continue on the list of projects that I have set for myself for this year. This includes the little wholecloth quilt we made in Quilt Along #11 -13...I really would like to make this again.

No doubt I will get side tracked throughout the year... I enrolled in a one off workshop on FMQ with  Australian long arm quilter and artist Kim Bradley in August at my local sewing shop. I am super excited about this as the practice piece that we are going to do looks just gorgeous with a huge feather design with different backgrounds (and stitched with metallic thread)...all very intricate. There might be another quilt in the making.

Anyway, back to work

Karin

Quilt Along #4

This week's focus was on stitching on a line. I was dreading this a bit thinking that this would surely not work for me. I must say though, I had a lot of fun with this. It was a lazy Saturday...very hot over here, so there was not much else to do but to stay inside the air conditioned house. Sat down at the sewing machine and just went for it. Here are my lines:

Bit hard to see on the front, so here is the back

I was amazed with the result. The stitching was not too bad at all. The only problem I had was that as soon as I stopped, I sort of continued with a bit of a jerk in the line before I could straighten myself out again.The other issue was the change of direction - in anticipation of the change I would generally start making tiny stitches when approaching the change or produce a knot as I missed the point of turning and obviously stitched on the spot. This got a bit better once I tried a few more lines.

The next thing I tried was the motif. I got a quilt pounce for Christmas so this was the perfect opportunity to try this out. Worked like a dream and I got a bit carried away with this and kept going on this tiny sample. I used 50/3 Gutermann thread with a 80/12 needle. If I was doing this on a quilt I would probably use Aurifil 50/2 so that the build up of stitches would be less noticable.

Great fun. I find that I often do really well on my samples but when it comes to a real quilt I get some sort of stage fright - I could really relate to Leah's post about 'fear' the other day. This year I promised myself that I would not give in to this and move out of my comfort zone. With this in mind I recently finished a quilt with a basic feather wreath in the alternate block. Nearly jumped off again with thinking that it wouldn't work, would take too much time, let's just quilt in the ditch and so on... I persisted and as I had to do 15 motifs I had no choice but to become comfortable with it.

One of the many samples before I went onto the quilt with it. Not perfect, but good enough.

 Back to the Quilt Along. Next I tried following a pattern and stitiching-in-the-ditch

This worked fine except I think I need heaps more practice on the quilting-in-the ditch. Had the same issue as above - as soon as I stopped, I did some jerky type stitches before I got going again in a straight line. I also could not stay in the ditch at all times. What a timesaver though! Would be good to be able to do this and not constantly have to get up to change the quilt around. 

Karin