FMQ Friday- Table Runner Finished

Finished my feather border design on my table runner. Absolutely loved doing this, although going around took a very long time. Almost has a meditative quality as you have to stitch it in a fairly slow and controlled manner.

Already posted about this on Wednesday but thought I share some more info about the FMQ. The border design was done using a stencil, hence it looks super even.

Yep, would be great if one could do this completely freehand. I want to practice more feathers in the near future on one of my other quilts and will have to do them freehand for that. I wonder whether I should draw in not only the spine but also a line at each side of the feathers. That would then give me a very defined area to work in. Mind you, chances are, I will not get my lines to match up  (ha, ha...). 

The feathers compacted my piece more than I thought they would and I then had some puffiness in the blocks. That certainly put a spanner in the works as I had been so focussed on the feathers that I did not really think much about the blocks. In the end I decided to embellish the blocks with simple line designs. The trick here was to get all the lines on the white fabric as consistent as I could...that way some wonkiness in the printed fabric was hardly noticeable.

While ok, I still think there is something missing. It seems to need more of something, but I am not sure what else one could do with this block. Thought about doing some filling of the white patches, however this is fraught with difficulties, as it will make the shadowing of the seams underneath really noticeable.

Anyway, this piece was all about the feathers. All that's left now is the binding unless I come up with some other brilliant idea (and I might given that I keep staring at it all the time).



Linking up to FMQ Friday on the Freemotion Quilting Project with Leah Day.

Karin

WIP Wednesday: Progress

Made some progress this week. Here is my table runner

Will post more detailed FMQ shots about this one on Friday. While nice, it lacks a bit of planning, i.e. I should have thought more about the quilting of the actual blocks. Border is beautiful but I was left wondering what to do with the blocks (which ultimately produced some unevenness in the quilting...hmm, maybe I should have used a filler design over the blocks...

And here is me hard at work on my baby quilt. Have decided on a loopy - loop design . In order to keep me focussed I had to have my drawing of the design next to me the whole time just to refer to the scale of the design and also to check every now and then in which direction I was going.  Loops are easy to stitch, however I don't find it that easy to fill up an area with any level of consistency. I am aiming for a scale of about an inch over a 3 - 4in area, so have to have a fair bit of speed to make those more sweeping kinds of movements. Very easy to then get lost in it all and end up too close or between some loops. So far, so good...half way through

Linking up to  WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced. (guest hosted by Claire from Sewing Over Pins)

Karin

WIP #3: Baby quilt

Pressing ahead...

Worked out what I want to do for my baby quilt in terms of all-over design

 Had to draw this a couple of times to experiment with the size. Now this does not look very difficult but loops can be tricky. Easy to back yourself in a corner when you are going the wrong direction. I am aiming for a scale of about 1 in circles spread over a 3in space.














Tested this on the fabric. Initially I was going to use light orange thread but I decided to go with cream. The quilt top is busy enough and the light orange will show any little irregularity in roundness of the loops and compete with the blocks. I think I will go for the blend in effect...

Linking up to Anything Goes Linky Party at Stitch by Stitch 



Karin

FMQ - Beautiful Feathers

As you can see I am hopping from one project to the next...well there is some method to this madness.

Firstly, I am not keen on leaving those basting pins in for too long on my white table runner. 

They leave pretty big holes as it is and are well used...I have had marks from them in the past when I have taken my time with the quilting. Next quilt show I will look for those Pinmoors!

Secondly, I am in need of practice before I let myself loose on an all-over design for my baby quilt.
So I decided to continue on my table runner with a feather border. As usual, this took me ages to work out...I used a commercial stencil, however did not have a corner element, so I had to draw one in. No particular reason as to why I used a commercial stencil other than that I had one handy and it had the wavy-ness that I wanted. It would have taken me ages to get a consistent wavy line across the length of the runner (I need to get one of those flexible curvy rulers). Must say I do not enjoy marking a quilt and definitely do not enjoy making a stencil fit a particular space. Bit of a challenge to get that consistent. In the end it was ..."close enough is good enough".

I think I prefer doing feathers freehand, maybe just having a wavy line to follow as I believe you develop a bit of a style of your own with feathers. Having done a freehand feather border not so long ago, it felt strange following these pre-drawn feathers. Mind you all good practice.

Here is a bit of a look...I am approximately half way through...I am using Aurifil 50/2 thread (love this thread), backtracking over the top of every alternate feather. I am taking my time and apart from a few glitches here and there it is going really well.

Absolutely love the look of this. I really enjoy doing feathers...actually going a bit through a feather phase at the moment. Very pleased with my efforts, I think it sets the blocks off really nicely. This is exactly how I had visualized this project...ha, ha, that does not happen that often!
Should have this finished by next week.

Linking up to Leah Day's Freemotion Quilting Friday.

Karin

WIP Wednesday

Have been busy...

WIP #3: Baby Quilt top finished and basted read to be quilted. Thinking of a loopy kind of FMQ design

WIP Table runner

 

Finished the stitching-in-the ditch. Forgot how tricky this can be. I am using white thread rather than Monofilament, so I need to be a bit more exact. While necessary at times, I actually do not like Monofilament thread that much and try to avoid it wherever I can

The blocks are beautiful (looks rather wrinkled here because it was folded up) and this should turn out nice. Still planning on a feather border and found a nice motif to put in the sashing. Looking forward to this.

This white top on the cream batting is a bugger to photograph...looks much better in real life

 

 

Apart from this I still have to baste (and continue on) my Colour Adventure quilt and continue on my FMQ piece....I cannot believe how many projects I started this year! 

Linking up to WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced.

Karin

WIP #3: Baby Quilt top finished

 

Hard to believe, but I finished the baby quilt top...yes, I made it again!








If you followed my earlier posts about this quilt, I realised that the direction of the fabric did indeed matter in the construction of the quilt. Unfortunately I only realised this after I had the quilt top just about finished. As I am planning to put this pattern on Craftsy or something similar, I did not want to lead people down the garden path as the mistake was in the construction of the blocks...hence my pattern needed to be altered (although with my fabric you would hardly notice the difference as the zebras are facing up and down, as do the clouds - however if you had fabric where direction mattered you would need to pay attention to this).

Had to have a bit of a break at that point, but re-wrote my instructions properly the other day and made the whole thing again, checking my instructions as I went along. Worked great ...was very happy with my write up and glad to be coming to an end. I did end up making the quilt a bit bigger and managed to get more of the zebra fabric which I will now use as the backing. Figure this, the same fabric still available after more than half a year! All that is left to do is to finish off the quilt, do some grammatical changes and formatting and I am ready to go. This is actually a nice little quilt to make and one that you could finish off in a weekend.

It will be interesting to see whether this will generate any interest but given that I have been talking and thinking about this for a good year by now, I just need to make it happen. No time for doubts. This will take some pressure of and I can then think about where I would like this idea to go.

Linking up to Anything Goes Linky Party at Stitch by Stitch and Let's Get Acquainted LinkUp at Plum and June this Monday hosted by Janice at Better Off Thread

Karin

Quilters' Show & Tell

Here is my contribution for this week's Quilters' Show & Tell held over at the Quilting Gallery. The theme for this week is Scrappy Triangles.

An 'Oldie but a Goodie', this quilt was one of the first bigger quilts that I made. It is used daily, has been through the washing machine several times and still looks great.

Broken Dishes quilt (2008)

and a close-up

So simple, yet so effective...

The blocks measure 8in and the overall size of the quilt is 75 1/2 x 51 1/2in. It is entirely made out of scraps (at that stage I was collecting offcuts at the local fabric shop).

The designer of this quilt is Jane Morgan and the original quilt is called 'Anything Goes...Scrap Quilt'  and was featured in Stunning Patchwork No 1, 2007.

Karin