Quilt Along #29 - hearts

This week on Leah Day's Quilt Along Wednesdays Leah showed us how to combine hearts (you can use any other shape you might like) with the 5 designs that we have been learning so far: Stippling, Zippling, Circuit Board, Loopy Lines and Sharp Stippling.

If you are wanting to improve your FMQ I highly recommend this Quilt Along. I am really noticing the improvement in my FMQ skill level compared to the beginning of the year. I can now sit down (even after a little break) and just go for it...I am far less concerned about imperfections and seem to have developed my own little rhythm that produces stitches that are on the whole pretty decent.

Here is my practice piece:

This is good fun

Close up

Using other shapes

The star is commonly used with the loops. Every time I do this, I have to stop and think which way to approach it, otherwise I get it wrong...very effective though and such a great playful design. I like the little leafy design...saw something like that in one of my quilting books and it seems to flow for me for some reason. That design seems to look good no matter how wonky you make the leaves and the veins really set it off. I wonder what else I could combine this with. Ran out of thread so I stopped here and continued on my UFO.

No questions...can't wait for the next design.

Until next time

Karin

Quilt Along #22-Wonky Block Quilt

Finished my wonky block quilt. I am really happy that I decided to do this one in the last minute even though I am still limping a week behind. Learned so much from doing this and I am really pleased with the outcome.

First of all - scale: kept loosely to a scale of a little bit less than 1/2 inch; that worked for most designs, but I discovered that some designs worked better at a 1/4 inch for me, i.e sharp stippling

Also, found this exercise really quite liberating as there was no point focusing on stitch quality. Had I done this, I would have gone mad. There are many issues in there...tiny stitches, wonky stitches and just plain ugly stitches but I found that the eyes seem to only see the majority of the stitching which looks absolutely fine. I was actually quite amazed by that and hence stopped worrying about it.










A look at the individual designs:

Loopy Lines design:
  

Not a problem but a bit tricky to fit into some areas depending on which direction you came from.

Sharp Stippling:

 Bit nervous about this one as I had read in some other posts that people had issues with that. I did two areas of this, one in a loop section and one larger area displayed above. As it turned out, I did two different scales. The above one is quilted at about 1/4 inch and that suited me somewhat much better. Once I got into the rhythm of this it just flowed and the effect is quite pretty. I think I prefer the design at this scale.

Zippling:

This was a big surprise to me...loved it. I am born to zipple. Worked like an absolute dream, could zipple myself out of any corner, had no issues with direction and the whole thing just flowed. Not sure I followed Leah's example of what this should actually look like. Seemed to develop my own way of doing this and have some pretty odd shapes in there. But again, the eye only sees the majority of the design which is consistently zig-zaggy enough. I was most impressed with this. Definitely will use this again.

Circuit Board:



Absolutely dreaded this one and nearly chickened out. Funny enough my brain does not appear to be wired for this one. Only worked for me after I drew myself a loose grid across the entire area (about 1.5 inches). This way I was surrounded by horizontal and vertical lines - while I did not quilt within those boxes I could always see the lines in the corner of my eyes. Not one of my favourites, even though it looks quite nice.




 Here is the end result.

Wonky Block Quilt 51" x 42.5"

Just need to find a proper name for this quilt and make a label.

Thank you, Leah, from Leah Day's Quilt Along Wednesday for this great project. Learned heaps from it and (bonus) this was just the right idea for this fabric.

Questions I had from last Quilt Along (which I posted too late):

- how far do you quilt to the edge of the quilt?

- does anybody have any tips on how to remove blue chalk marks (the variety that is used for dressmaking? The packet says to use a damp cloth which I tried and it does not just dissolve, so I am wondering if it is going to come out at all.

- I have a Pfaff machine and have a drop-in bobbin case - would you use the Magic Bobbin washers with that?

Until next time

Karin

Quilt Along #18

This week we are doing Loopy Lines in the Quilt Along Wednesdays with Leah Day.  Fun, fun, and more fun. My brain definitely can cope much better with loops...

Here is my practice run (had to photograph the back as the front is too hard to see).

No problems at all with this...very relaxing design, so I went straight for my practice quilt of simple squares and quilted away. Could not resist with all those empty squares around me and continued to fill another square with Sharp Stippling. This looks great and I am very happy with my efforts.

Looking at the close-up you may see that I ruled 1 inch lines roughly across the square to give me some sense of direction because I discovered that the design looks way better if you spread it over two lines and loop up and down. If you look closely you can see that I reverted back to just doing one line of loops in the second row and it then does look somewhat disjointed (that is how I used to do it and always wondered why it looked somewhat strange). I like the look of this.

Apart from this I have been working on my table runner (still quilting-in-the ditch) and, I think you call this, 'lurking' around other blogs. I spend quite some time at the Free Motion Quilt Challenge at Insights from SewCalGal. This is a fantastic blog and I practiced some feathers that were presented in an informative tutorial by Diane Gaudynski in February and also had a bit of a try out of some of the ideas presented by Cindy Needham in this month's tutorial.  Would love to participate, however I am almost working full-time and there is not a lot of time left to work on the projects I have currently going let alone taking on additional ones.

There is just so much inspiration out there and great opportunities to participate and learn together. For myself, I will just have to keep it small and contained otherwise it will become a chore in itself. So, with this in mind , I just 'played' around, tried a few new designs, experimented with some thread and just doodled away on some fabric...this was really relaxing and thoroughly enjoyable. Promised myself to do this more often.

 

Until next time

Karin

Quilt along #15 - Sharp Stippling

I am participating in Leah Day's Quilt Along Wednesdays and after some months of stippling we are off to try some different designs. This week we are looking at Sharp Stippling.

Watched the video and off I went:

Started just doing a row of flame like shapes (about 1/2" scale) and kept going in rows....hmm...not quite as easy as I thought. I could not go much beyond doing rows of the shape. The interlocking of the design somewhat eluded me. I then tried to do it on a smaller scale really concentrating on trying to add some complexity and variation:

My stitching became smaller and smaller...I think that this is about 1/4" scale. Very wobbly in terms of consistency of stitching and the variation in the shape was still a bit 'hit and miss'. I liked the way that this did not seem to matter much in the overall look of the design. The areas don't seem to have to be consistent to look good. Stitching it, I felt that I could not get the 'rhythm' of this design. I needed some sort of image to think about while doing it, similarly to stippling which I originally learned thinking very hard about Mickey Mouse ears. If I just think of flames I seem to produce consistent rows of flames...so I included some 'bird' shapes:

This worked a bit better for me...less concentration and more mental images. I went back to a scale of about 1/2" and think that this looks quite respectable. I have got a few larger unquilted areas in it when I could not decide what shape I was going to pursue, but overall the texture is lovely. Quite a nice design but I don't think I could stitch it any bigger than the 1/2" scale.

Questions:

- how do I get the rhythm of a design? I do doodle the design before I actually stitch it, but that often does not give me the 'flow' or 'rhythm' of it because as soon as I hesitate while sewing I usually loose the general direction in which I am heading. (Maybe I am going too fast in general or it simply needs more practice)

- I am thinking of doing all these practice samples on solid fabric (of which I got stacks) and then later on stitching them together using the Quilt-as-you-go method. Would I just mark myself a square on my fabric and just stitch within that or stitch all over my sample and cut it to size later (wouldn't that become undone then?) when attaching the sashing?

Now off to do some quilting

Karin