Quilting Away

On my third charity quilt for the Orange Tree Quilters group. Certainly getting a lot of practice for stitching in the ditch!

Now there is this one

This is giving me a bit of a headache in terms of how to quilt this. The brief is not to over-quilt...easier said than done. The quilt top itself is not entirely straight and bows in the middle so an allover design would have pushed all that to the sides and down which would then give me problems in stitching down those borders.

In the absence of any great ideas started to ditch this along the dark pink Drunkard Path shapes. This is working out nice and does exactly what I was hoping for. It lifts the dark pink fabric and puffs them up a bit which instantly makes this look much nicer than just the flat quilt top (and bonus, it eats up some of the bulky bits). Stitching in the ditch around the curved bits is actually a lot of fun. I am using my Handiquilter Versa tool for that aligning the longer curve around the Drunkard Path curves. While not an exact match it is relatively easy to massage this into place and go in a tidy manner around the curve.

What to do with this? I am thinking of putting a simple feather flower in the middle and then started looking at all the other white space. Feathers would go well in the white spaces but upon closer inspection I realised that this is put together in a very odd way. While I could frame the center with a feather running all around, the next white space would need a feather starting in the middle running out to both sides. Looking further ahead then, the next row of white would be incredibly awkward as it is just a portion of the previous row...putting feathers in there would just look weird. In fact, looking closely at this, I then realised that the maker put two borders of semi-circles around the center and that this was the reason I got so confused about what was going on with this design. 

Currently I am thinking of filling the white spaces with alternating feathers and some sort of loose filler, then repeat half the feather flower of the center in each of the white semi circles  next to the thin border.

Then do a simple wavy feather in the reddish border. Not sure whether this would be too much. Alternatively one could just leave it, but that then leaves a lot of blocks not stitched down.

Will need to do some more drawings to figure out what to do. Let me know if anyone out there has any great ideas. There probably is something I have not thought about yet.

 

Karin

Enjoyable Afternoon

I have been super busy, but finally got around to start quilting one of the charity quilts I collected from the Orange Tree Quilters Group.

The Orange Tree Quilter's group is a charity quilting group that provides quilts and other associated craft products for people in need in the community. They are an incredibly busy and productive group.  They donated some 300 quilts last year to varies good causes and do need help to have the many quilt tops that they produce, quilted. I have been wanting to help out for a while but other things have always got in the way. I did finally venture out and visited the group on one of the days they meet. I picked up three quilts that had been selected for me, already pinned and ready to go. This was a number of weeks ago...

I love scrap quilts. I did quilt a quilt top for this group before some years ago..a scrappy happy little quilt. This time I got a quilt with some crazy blocks...

Started the ditching

As I was ditching I was looking around at the fabric. This quilt seems to have some very old fabric in there...maybe the blocks got donated...so I started to look a bit closer and found this...aunty acid😆

How funny is that? Can't imagine what that fabric line looked like. Maybe a fabric that had laundry tips? Acid?

Wow...I laughed at that.

Stitching in the ditch is always good practice and I am certainly finding it easier the more I do it. Once I had finished that I decided to put a simple line design in the solid blocks with the Pro Echo 8 ruler (yep, still my favourite curve rulers).

I was actually amazed at how much better I had become at doing this design. Still remember when I could not hit the centre point consistently and the curves looked all a bit inconsistent within a block. No problem with that anymore, it seems...went very smoothly and looks really quite nice. I am now wondering whether I need to do some ditch stitching in the crazy blocks. Maybe just the main seams...the fabric looks puffy and somewhat fragile. I think I prefer this stitched down a bit so that laundering this will not become a problem in the future.

Apart from this I might just do a simple line design in the border just to stitch that down. The brief is not to over-do the quilting.

Really enjoying this...two more to go after this, but for next week I will have to continue working on my Cassowary. Want to get that done to free up the sewing machine.

Karin