43.8 More Ruler Work Observations from Beginner – MAL 2019

I am staying as true as possible to the quilt for 15 minutes challenge for the month of March – aka March A Long. The only date that might have been missed was Friday. Even on Thursday when I was feeling a little under the weather, I looked through some designs in books that have been sitting on the shelf for years.

I have been staying on my free motion / ruler work for quilting working on my practice project.

Last week I did some cross hatching, this week, I tried out the football curved ruler.

A little bit of practice every day. One day was the outline of two footballs offset on the same row, the next day was the pebbles.

I filled in the corners with this weird gap thing set aside for something and the swirls that I almost see as my default traveling pattern.

I have found that instead of a generic meander, I tend to go with swirls as a “I don’t know what filler to go next with” filler to get from place to place and to speed up.

As you may notice I have a strange red thread design in the center of these white patches.

I did this with the marking pen around the ruler for the center of the design. This was to practice using my marking pen. I am not known to do a ton of marking or registration marks on my quilting. The pen took a while to get used to being used again, but seemed to do decent with the initial design.

This was before tackling any of the “rulers on the machine” work. Then I echoed it. Three times. Uhhh… two echoes, three lines.

Anyway, I am mostly happy with the work I did on the first pass, but my echoing skills leave a lot to be desired.

I am wondering what about this is hard for me to do correctly. Is it that I go too fast, or I can’t see well enough or I just “lose where I am” a little, or am a little careless, or I try to “make up for previous passes” by making a change the next echo and then actually make it worse.

Granted, this would be better if the thread color actually matched the background.

This is a small issue I have to work out on my own. This quilt has both light and dark patches, and for some reason, I have decided to make it all symmetrical. Same shapes in each corner, same threads. Sometimes it means that the thread color contrasts, the other times it blends. More or less.

I am finding myself feeling moments of “rush” with this quilt. It is practice, I did not piece it. I do not see it hanging in my house, or given to someone else. I don’t know if it would be “good enough” to donate to the local hospital or not (for a lap quilt), I am mostly going through the motions on this quilt to really use as practice.

So I am periodically “speeding up” through some of the quilting.

When I first started, I was having lots of shredding thread issues. Because of that, I lowered the tension “way down”. So what did that cause? Eyelashes.

I went through the entire corner blue section with this rushed, low tension top which caused the back to eyelash incredibly badly throughout.

I am finding it hard to make myself stop and figure out what I am doing wrong, just getting through the section of practice without doing as much learning as I “could be.”

Since I was needing more practice echoing, I decided to use the curved rulers to help me out on echoing this.

And then finding a fill that works too. This worked well. I am amazed at how much I get confused or frustrated when turning the quilt around to the the other side of the design. Somehow now doing the same shape, in the same way, on the same kind of quilting background, I feel more frustrated on the 2nd half than the first half. Almost every time.

I am finding myself hitting the ruler on the machine, or getting it stuck behind where the foot gets in the way.

At least I figured out that the more I can do on the machine in one direction, the better off I seem to be. The first few circles/loops, I was turning all the way around instead of working “just the tops,” or “just the bottoms”.

I think if this machine was a higher shank machine with more throat space, this task would seem way easier at the moment.

Which I have to use what I have at the moment. I need to start a fund for getting either a Juki or something bigger like a sit down 16 HQ. But that, being down the road a bit, will have to wait. It’s hard to say, because I do really like piecing a LOT, and designing a LOT, and for those activities I only need the machine I have now.

I hate to come away from this post feeling negative about the whole experience. I am not feeling that way necessarily.

This is fun, I might need to figure out how to move on to my real projects pretty soon though. Keep my tension in check. Watch for my foot slipping off the screw and falling down – something that happened this morning and caused issues trying to get through some of the tough seams on the underside in particular.

This is really nice, and I am glad I am working on this, and I know in a few short weeks I will be piecing again.

This is my stopping point at the moment. I need to get on and do a few other things this weekend. I have a plan for the other four corners in this section, and I have three of them to do still. I really hope this practice quilt doesn’t take the entire month of March to quilt, but as long as I March-A-Long and keep at it, I will eventually be done! And I will have a nice reference too!

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43.7 First Weekend of MAL 2019 Free Motion Ruler Work – Beginner’s Perspective and Setup

I love March for many reasons, none of which is the snow that fell last night. March provides a good jump to get me in the blogging mood, in addition to the quilting mood.

For the uninitiated or new who lost/missed my last two posts, today, March 3rd, is the third day of March-A-Long. A monthly sewing celebration of working on quilting for 15 minutes a day during the month of March to see how much we can get done with a tiny bit of discipline.

Some years, I focus on a specific project, some years I just work to further along all my projects.

This year, I have decided to focus on Free Motion Quilting, and finally learn some quilting ruler work.

To start, last week was basting a bunch of small quilts with the goal of getting the stained glass quilt quilted by the end of the month.

Then I purchased from Amazon a roll of Oven Liner.

Wait?! What? What does that have to do with quilting or ruler work?

A comment from a FB group by someone I don’t know said the word Oven Liner, and since I didn’t already own a supreme slier, seemed to be a cheap way to experiment to see if I would like to try smoothing down my surface for free motion quilting. I could cut it to length I needed, I could make cutouts on it.

So the roll of oven liner is now on top of my sew-ezi table and “heirloom (aka inherited)” table next to it.

I cut a 2nd piece of the oven liner to serve as a “bridge piece” behind my sew ezi table. Behind, I have a machine in a cabinet (Aquata) that hasn’t seen the light of day since I got my magnolia machine. MMMMMM

I set my tv on top of the aquata cabinet, and it sits (higher, sadly) behind my table. And then proceed to watch Craftsy/Bluprint videos from the tv while quilting.

The oven liner is really helping to bridge my quilts up to the higher level without fuss or problem. I do think I am putting a tiny kink in the oven liner. Oh well.

I cut a small hole for the needle and used the oven liner all day. Used blue painter’s tape to keep it secured to each surface needed.

This DOES HELP the quilt slide fairly well! I was impressed with how well it worked! Cost me half as much as a supreme slider, was versatile and helpful.

What I did not realize that to change the bobbin, I was making things worse.

No one has ever accidentally sewed up their supreme slider to the back of their quilt and then ripped out the stitches, have they?

I would lift up the right side of my tape to get all up underneath to change the bobbin.

I started having bobbin tension issues. First, I had different thread in top and bottom. Then I kept having the issue where the bobbin thread wraps around the wrong way (though I thought I did it the right way every time). Lots of different times. Changed tensions, tension on the top seemed super tight even just threading and re-threading the machine.

Tension on the top is now down super low, which seems to be “on par” for this machine specifically.

Cleaned up inside the machine as much as I was able to dare without hurting the machine or doing anything too rash like taking it apart.

I realized I really need to get this professionally cleaned. Ugg. Not this month.

The cleaning and tension and changing the bobbin threads seemed to help.

I have been watching Free Motion quilting videos (already said that). By virtue of the idea that I could lower my feed dogs, which I only discovered in January of this year because I was supposed to have a workshop that got cancelled due to weather, I was able to get the ruler foot on the machine – correctly and without hassle – and place the ruler in front, or to the side of my foot.

My ruler foot is one of those aftermarket ones instead of one of the Janome ones. Some time ago, I bought a ruler foot, had problems with the ruler hitting the back when trying to use the ruler, had a poor ruler with very low markings on it, and frustrated with the entire idea of ruler work and put the whole thing away for a year or so.

I am realizing now that this low shank machine is why I was frustrated. And my aftermarket foot is why. And my feed dogs.

I had always gone by Leah Day’s idea that “it’s ok to keep your feed dogs up” and just worked around that idea in the past. I couldn’t predict the height of the feed dogs with the non-hopping ruler foot, I was used to my hopping free motion foot.

In the past, I really didn’t spend a ton of time working on this problem.

Watching the videos now, I realize that a common problem of these aftermarket feet is the space between the foot and the “foot holder post thing”.

Angela Walters said that you try to use rulers on the front or left for some machines, and Amy Johnson said some rulers have different thicknesses and that the low shanks like what I have is just going to give problems getting the ruler to go around back.

Here are my (now growing) list of rulers for quilting.

The ruler on the farthest left is probably an ok ruler, but it has only one marking vertically, and one marking horizontally. I do believe this ruler, I was trying to use in a way that wasn’t going to be successful (in the past), and even after I had done some practice, at the end of the day yesterday, I was still trying to use the ruler just to see, and getting frustrated. So I think this ruler is not for me.

Next to it, is an “s curve” ruler, also with minimal markings.

And the spiral, which is either going to be really long from now when I figure out how to use, or just going to be available as a “marking-type” ruler instead of a “quilting-up-next-to-the-foot” ruler

I also put onto the backs of these rulers just this morning were these dots.

You might be able to see on the s type ruler two purple blotches. This is a cheap version of “invisigrip” in the form of purple colored Hugo’s Amazing Tape, which I got for board games and use to keep my board game cards together in a group. Not really feeling the groove of this ruler either, maybe it is the gripping, maybe the size, maybe the lack of markings, maybe it is something else.

When I did put the Tight Grips product onto the backs of my other rulers, I could tell a distinct difference, these rulers stay put. Or seem to.

Anyway, the other thing I worked on this morning was fixing the main problem of loading my bobbin from the top underneath the oven liner. I cut out, again with exacto-knife, the area around the bobbin area. Because I happened to look up when Amy was showing off her supreme slider and by golly there was a hole in hers around the bobbin area.

I hit my head with a “do-ooohhh-innng” kind of realization that I could do that too.

Only took an entire day of stitching and messing with and being slightly upset about having to change the bobbin.

I keep thinking I am going to actually stitch this morning/afternoon, but I might not. I have been working on this blog post, fixing my area around my machine, fixing my oven liner solution, moving some of the furniture in the back around slightly differently, going out to scoop the snow for tomorrow.

I have found it easier to get started quilting when I have a plan, and right now the parts I have on this practice quilt, I don’t have a plan for. Yet.

Anyway, that was the very tinsey itsy bit of my March-A-Long. Join in, tag #marchalong or #sqmarchalong or something similar, reply here or FB. Let me know you’re up and doing this! We can all get more quilting done together if we work at it, little by little.

I didn’t get to show off my crosshatching, which was done with the curved westalee ruler I got with my foot. The half feathers at the top of this picture was done some time ago.

39.6 March-A-Long 2016 first week

I am testing out my Instagram skills this month to try to stay “on top of” pictures for the daily tasks of March-A-Long. March-A-Long is a commitment to sew/quilt/plan for 15 minutes daily during the month of March. As you can see above, this is the pieces of the new block of the month from Ula Lenz Stained Glass Ray of Hope quilt.

A lot of my personal time has been spent on Craftsy. Relearning Free Motion Quilting techniques & designs. I echo quilted the insides of this quilt, but not yet the outsides. Background fabric is too different, so I am going to decide what color works today for this small top.

If you’ve participated in sewing for 15 minutes a day in March, let me know! Glad to know I’m in such great company already!

Have a great week, and keep on getting those stitches in! Keep experimenting!

36.0 Tricord Ribbons Dancing around the Corner

This quilt I decided to remake. If you are a regular follower of my blog (and previous podcast) you may have heard / seen this quilt before.

I am getting really close to being done with this quilt, now is all the handwork portion of the quilt left. The steps I still have left for this quilt are: one side of binding, hand tacking the sleeve to the back, sewing the label to the back, sewing the beads on at the appropriate parts.

I took the quilt outside today and pretended that all four binding sections were sewn down.

Let me back up a little bit and show you some process. Since I am a process girl.

Last picture you have seen (according to my notes) was just before the completed corners were sewn onto the quilt. Well yes, you saw it sewn down with the batting and all, but there were some skipped steps on that silent sunday.

I took apart this quilt, ripped off the binding, sewed together the paper pieced corners with the gold diamonds in the corners.

Then I sewed the sashing directly onto the corners, I oversewed on the edges, figuring it would all square up at a later time. Probably dangerous to my final project, but in the end it worked.

I don’t know that I recommend this method for other people, it very much uses the “fly by the seat of your pants” method of sew it bigger and then chop it down later instead of accurate measuring and calculating.

And I repeated this for all four corners.

I found the center of my corner blocks and the center of my quilt edge – see the pins on the right and left, those are center – centering pins to help me line up.

As you can see, I decided to do right/left at the same time, it made sense to me at the time.

The technique is from Ann Peterson’s Craftsy class. I did do it on the diagonal instead of as a border that follows straight. I just attached triangles instead of rectangles to the sides.

And Ann Peterson did not necessarily address sashing, but again, I just attached it to the corners first.

And before these got sewn down, I put the backing and then batting on the back side of the quilt.

This image is of the quilt flipped over, the hibiscus Hawaiian print is the original backing, and the blue swirl fabric is right sides together laying on top, with the batting on the very back of the quilt.

So the sandwich goes from top to bottom:

1. Front paper pieced corner with attached sashing, good side facing the original quilt sandwich
2. The first (original) quilt sandwich
3. The new corner backing, good side facing the original quilt sandwich
4. The corner-shaped batting

And then after sewing the first two corners, I had to take a TV break.

This was the boring part so I don’t have any pictures of it.

I had to take my scissors and trim out all the batting. At this stage, there are two layers of batting on the right side of the seam I sewed above.

1. The layer between the original quilt sandwich, the very original batting
2. The very outside batting – the one that we put on the very back

So with large ginger scissors and some new Havel small scissors that are becoming my favorites. They have long handles, a curve, and I feel comfortable cutting close to the fabric with these.

I can’t remember which pair I ordered and I can’t find the email, but these are really nice scissors. I also bought a shorter curved blade seam ripper which I also like, but not as much as these scissors.

…. Anyway ….

These scissors helped me to remove the batting from in between the two pieces of fabric on the seam allowance side of the seam. Removing the inside batting is such a pain in the tuckus, but getting this out before sewing down the other two corners was helpful. TV was definitely involved somehow as a distraction mechanism.

And then good good pressing! As much as I could press out. Even with the removing of the batting, and the pressing, if you look closely, you can still see sort of a bulge.

Then I repeated the process with the other two corners.

And, even with as careful as I was to line up the centers, I was a little bit off. For some reason, even with my walking foot, I find the top fabric always shifts lower than the sandwich part on the bottom. If I thought it was the foot and not the user, I would get another walking foot and see where the error is, but geesh walking feet are a little pricy.

And then I showed off my non quilted corners on twitter and the like.

And then I found this amazing dahlia line drawing online when I was searching for FMQ designs. This is supposed to be a coloring page for 4th of July, but this is absolutely perfect for my quilt. Link following to my pinterest page on it.

And I did the blowing up the design by like 200% and tape it together, and then sew holes in the punched out pattern, and then use the pounce to transfer the generic grid of the dahlia to the quilt itself.

I forgot pictures of this part during the weekend I did all that.

And then quilted the dahlia, and did echo circles of all three colors on the corner quilting and left some negative unquilted spaces between.

And during the week that Robin Williams died, I listened to a podcast and quilted the last rows outside the dahlia. Good way to get out grief and confusion to quilt something.

The best picture of my quilting I took today. (It is still not that great of picture, actually).

The inner circle is the pink, the middle circle is the turquoise, and the outer circle is the purple.

And then I had the perfect color binding already picked out, and I mimicked my original piping idea with a very small kicker / flange type of thing. I cut four 1 inch strips, folded them together lengthwise, wrong sides together, and then stuck them directly underneath my binding that I attached from the front (to hand bind).

I have done flanges under several borders of my quilt, and let me tell you that 1 inch was just perfect in the right amount of color just popping out for this quilt. I love the affect it gives.

I didn’t know I didn’t like piping until I took the piping out of the original quilt. I am glad I put it back together without the cord inside. Maybe that was user-error?? Anyway, I like it now.

What’s left?

• The one side hand bound,
• tacking down the sleeve,
• recreating the label,
• adding new and old label to the quilt,
• hand sewing beads to the corners of the new quilting design.

I almost wonder what hot-fix crystals would look like on this quilt? I wonder if this is the quilt where I find out how to do them?

Right now I am VERY glad I spent the time recreating this quilt. It was a good quilt before, and I think I bumped it up a couple of levels with all the new stuff I did to the quilt.

So yes, done is better than perfect, BUT ….

Sometimes “perfect” is more satisfying in the end. I will be glad to be able to hang this quilt up on the wall again!

Maybe I will even enter it into the regional show we’re having next June. But we don’t get much space for guild quilts, so if my guild mates don’t chose it, I will have to try to get it judged.  I really want to enter a different quilt for the regional show however, the red & black kings puzzle quilt.

But first the borders. And the boutique items, and the “ghost bunnies” for the NICU kids, and the round robin projects. And quilting and binding and other things!

35.6 Golden Card Trick Quilt

In my “year of FMQ” I have sat down and finally quilted this card trick quilt that I have had in the works since April of 2009. Making it my oldest UFO.

I do realize that there still needs to be one small line I missed on the card trick block itself and the corners aren’t tacked down – said I would get to them later & forgot that I never finished them until after I put my FMQ foot away for the day.

The card trick & square in square blocks are quilted on the top with a golden/orange contrasting thread.

But the threads on the straight lines in the ditch around the blocks are much lighter – a light taupe for some of the straight lines.  For the swirly details I decided to pick a color in between the lighter taupe and the golden/orange, and use a golden yellow color thread for quilting.

Quilting is swirls and long feathers in a box around this section.

And circles and a pinched block for the middle of the blocks.

This quilting went rather well, and is the largest thing I have pushed through my Janome Magnolia machine. Not too hard to do, but too much bigger would be harder than this.

A small amount of success for finishing the quilting. I have been weary of “overquilting” this quilt, but I think this one plays nicely with some curves and some straight line free motion quilting. I have basic straight lines in the borders.

I could alternate with fills, but currently they are left plain, which is fine with me at this time.

35.4 Requilting the Dancing Ribbons Quilt

This quilt has had a LOT of ‘redos’ on it, and now I am redoing the”final” quilting as well. This project was considered finished in January of 2013, I put down the 20th to be exact. It has been hanging on the back of my front door in the time since the quilt has been finished – the sleeve went on long ago.

The recent talk of some of my online quilting friends of Round Robins has lead me to look at many different Round Robin pictures on Pinterest & other places, which has caused me to think of how delightful this Dancing Ribbons would look as an on-point center of a larger quilt.

I have been subscribed to Ann Peterson’s Craftsy class “Quilting Big Projects on a Small Machine”, and I was watching it recently, and I think I can take her medallion quilt techniques and put corners on this quilt and set the already quilted quilt on point.

The original design.

This quilt has always been special, but it has been missing the “fantastic-ness” I usually love in quilting. That AND I LOVE changing things up, adding a little bit more, and a little bit more.

All this talk about Round Robins and turning a quilt on point reminds me of my favorite picture of my small dancing ribbons quilt.

I have also recently been watching Cindy Needham’s Craftsy class on Wholecloth Quilting and between two two classes, I have been brave enough last weekend to rip off the binding, rip out the piping and rip out the adequate but not spectacular FMQ done on the outer edge (which ripping took way too long considering there wasn’t all that much of it really).

So this went from a finished project to an unfinished project that I have renewed excitement about.

I decided a variation of the last post what I want to do with this quilt, posting an EQ7 picture of what I (currently) envision the finished quilt to look like.

Over two different days this past week, I have tried to purchase the brighter versions of blue for the outside. I have yet to decide exactly which blues will go. The first batch all the blues were exactly the same shade.

 

 

Now I have a more varied number of blues and a different in between color. Freshly washed.

 

Still living with the colors & values right now to see what I like.

On Tuesday, I spent a generous amount of time creating ‘sunshine & shadows’ (Cindy’s term) by adding crosshatch lines as background filler to the currently finished quilting project.

And a few stitches in the middle of the quilt for the yellow portions.

Then I found this really great picture of quilting online which inspired my own version of the spade/heart shape, modifying the design of Gerri Smit to put in the corners of my original quilt to give the quilt some light pizzaz.

I have improved some on my FMQ this past year, and 2014 is the year of FMQ, so this is very exciting to me right now!

And if you didn’t notice earlier, here are my attempts at adding pizzaz. Didn’t take many different takes at getting this right, this design I didn’t have to practice too much, and it adds so much detail to this quilt.

Today was another sewing day, but even though I have momentum on this idea, because I am still hashing out the colors in my head for the right fabric, I changed direction and did some straight line stitching all over my card trick quilt (now my oldest UFO).

Card Trick has been basted for a month or two. I chose an orange/brown color thread over the top of the card trick pieces which I think ties together the colors nicely even though none of that color even shows up on the quilt.

35.2 Gimme Quilt Bling aka Make it Shiny

I have spent the greater part of today either researching free motion quilting (fmq) or actually practicing/doing free motion quilting.

Once I get onto Pinterest boards, I jump from board to board to board and see many examples of beautiful, exquisite, intricate free motion quilting designs.

Here’s mine. Depending on what date you check it, there will be more things here. Currently at 349 pins, but it’s MY fastest growing Pinterest board, so I expect to be at 500 shortly.

The more I look, the more I see that catches my eye. The more I know what I like on quilting and what I don’t.

And the more I want to quilt and free motion quilt.

A while ago I bought some shiny metallic threads. I think many of them came from Fabric Recycles. I had never metallic threads until this past month of quilting.

My soft Scrapitude started it, being so springy-springlike-pastelly.  I have been looking at my light verigated metallic thread for a while so I had to try it out.

 

This was a picture from last week, I decided this week to add to the metallic and I decided on the design to be able to do it. I don’t know that I got any other better pictures of the bling, but here is the “hopefully finished” (I will explain this qualifier in a second) Scrapitude wall hanging quilt.

There are many different areas and quilting threads on this quilt. I had more that I had wanted to do on the outside, but for now I decided to stop.

Here’s the very center that has a storm-at-sea feeling, surrounded by vines, surrounded by orange peel types, surrounded by boxes of pearls.

And a close up if you centered on the box of pearls.

I added on the left side, a block that I am calling the Pea Pod block, as that is what it reminds me of – pea pods, and I like eating peas.

And there are two shiny triangles, and a vine on the top and bottom, and I found a really cool circular swirl design that I really liked for the center. The design was modified by a pantograph design that I saw online this morning. The circular swirl is also done in shiny variegated metallic, but it is hard to see the metallic flickers in this light.

I had put this quilt aside for a portion of the day, before making some final decisions about the center blocks.

And noticed a couple of things.

I am not finished with some finished quilts.

I am noticing a really nagging feeling/desire to undo-refinish two quilts.

This does not imply that I am ripping (that I know of) any more than the binding on one quilt, and maybe resewing the sleeve on the other quilt.

I can’t recall if I ever posted this little scrappy quilt before.

This is how it has been hanging on my wall for at least 5.5 months.

 

And the quilting on it is okay, but I keep staring at it, and thinking – this quilting needs more…. Needs More…. NEEDS MORE….. NEEDS MORE!!!

See …. nagging feeling …. I have been screaming inside my head like that for a while now, but until Scrapitude and the shiny thread, I didn’t know how much this jewel toned quilt wanted bling of its own!

And granted, in the above picture, quilting isn’t easy to see, but it was verigated pinks, and pretty, and a nice pattern (something I decided on a quilting pattern like 2.5-3 years ago, but never finished the quilting until last fall today.

All this searching & quilting lead me to put in some ovals in spots and to do some metallic echo bling (name of a band, right? – here’s Metallic Echo Bling ;))

And this was requilted-overquilted-blinged up-shinier today during quilting sections of Scrapitude.

Here’s the center echoed out.

And the sides of the ocean waves more echoed. In addition to the ovals inside the arches.

Only problem I forgot is that I had already attached the sleeve. So now the quilting I did today has tacked down the sleeve and will now have to be sewn down again or find another way to hang this quilt.

And I also want to take my dancing ribbons and put it on point as a medallion quilt.

I could leave the sashing as the light blue, but I keep thinking I need to add corners on this quilt, so I will consider ripping out the binding, repurposing it for sashing or not using it at all, and adding something lively on the corners of this quilt. Then the quilt will be bigger and I will see it more the way I want to see it.

I think the round robin is helping me think about dancing ribbons in a new way, which is VERY YAY.

But also means that now I am “attacking” two finished & bound quilts to work on – the scrappy jewel that I posted that is now blinged out, and the dancing ribbons which is back on the design wall again. Crazy.

I may even try to find some blue metallic thread. Or not. I will have to really watch the Craftsy class again about “Sewing Big Projects on a Small Machine” by Ann Peterson, as there will be the best tips to making this thing go from finished quilt, to on-point quilt center.

So now I am not sure if I am finished even when I am finished. I know “editing down” has always been my weak spot (just ask anyone who used to listen to my podcast) but I will be glad to work on this quilt again, it’s been telling me for months that it didn’t like being finished the way it was, and I am finally in a position to figure out what to do about it – in theory.

But that’s how a good experiment goes. Just when you think you’re done, a new question pops up and throws you right back into the beginning of the scientific method all over again!

33.6 Completed Fans & Bows Quilt

I completed this quilt ON New Year’s Day. So technically I have a finish for 2014.

According to someone … other people … what you do on New Years will be what you do the rest of the year.

So I guess this year is the year of the quilt finish. LOL.

Well, you’ve already seen some of the in progress pictures for this quilt. Here’s the completed thing.

And now you can see why it’s called Fans & Bows.

The red corners mimic bows, but I did hand tie some bows to go in the middle of the quilt at each border.

The lace is really pretty, I stretched it to get around the corners and with the bow & lace embellishment, this will be more of a ‘look at me’ quilt than a “let’s sit under me” quilt. But that’s ok.

The evolution of this quilt from the VERY start – March 15 2009, the second weekend of my quilting journey, I designed & pieced this top.

And I saw all the white, and thought, cool – quilting space. But not yet.

So the following National Quilting day 2010 I made up some fans I had in the back of the butterfly book I bought back then.

Well the design was from a month earlier. Here are the fan pieces.

And after I first stitched them down, this was my first fusible applique project.  That I used a ‘decorative stitch’ to sew with my brother.

All four fans changed the look of the quilt quite a bit.

The next few months in 2010, I decided on the blank corners that now needed something.

I spent some time making the back out of pieced fabrics. Strange, but I was excited about the back. This was Feb of 2011.

And then I fused the quilt and set the whole thing aside.

With the exception of finding some lace that I thought would compliment the quilt perfectly. Bought the lace in 2012, when going embellishment crazy for my periodic table quilt.

And once settling down on my cabinet machine Aquata, I decided to quilt her – finally. In early December of 2013.

The momentum gathered by free motion quilting her, lead me to sew the lace once I had time.

Here is a better picture of the center quilting (before I attached the lace)

Another picture of the corners quilting pre-lace.

And the back side of the quilt with the quilting and a few thread nests that I decided not to pick out.

And the quilting showing up on the corner design on the back.

And a few more quilting with lace pictures. center.

Corner with lace

Hope you enjoy. Most of the quilting was done with similar colors to the top, but not all. I know I could have done a steadier job if I had sketched out beforehand a little bit on the FMQ, but I was excited with how it was flowing.

I was really glad to finally not do a pantograph or an overall design. Currently, I am thinking I need to work on custom work more, but when using the long arm, I don’t – because my time there is limited.

I can’t believe how old of a UFO this quilt was, and I am so glad to get it finished!

33.5 More custom Free Motion Quilting on Fans And Bows

I have been working towards quilting this red and white quilt top of mine for over the past week.  I have done a little each day, worked on a little every day, trying to figure out what to do on each section each day, getting a little further in trying to make the designs symmetrical.

I have not finished, but I have been doing an okay job at the FMQ on this red and white quilt.

I have these antennae guys in the corners between some of the red white 9 patches.

You already saw the corner arches, but I decided to go over the tops in red.

and I have some more red quilting in some of the other sections. Like on my fans. Here was the first day. Red on red if you can see.

The design on the fans becomes more evident when I quilted the red on the black.

And there is some overstitch of red on the quilting next to the fans. So I have a few more plans to cover over with red in places, and probably have some more white areas to do once I figure those out.

The back taken at some point really shows the quilting since the back is more black in nature.

And I haven’t yet made up the stitching in the brown sections of the border.

And I have a black lace that I have been wanting to add to this quilt for almost 2 years now.  But that will be added after the main base has been quilted.

I always wanted this quilt to have a lot of quilting. Glad that I waited until I could be “good enough” to quilt this, but not perfect.

I have used a lot of inspirations (no feathers as of yet), I have used a few techniques that I liked, double outlining things, doing rows of beads / a.k.a. pebbles (stone bridges). And swoops.  Now that I’ve started this, I need to keep inspiring myself to finish so I can knock off one inspiring quilt that has been on my list for a really really long while.

I have to start & stop sometimes due to the heat of my plug-in. Which also works out good for my shoulders too. This thing is one of my larger ‘wall quilts’ so it is probably considered lap size. I could consider quilting something bigger on Aquata, and maybe after this, I will do just that.

 

33.4 One machine, one purpose

I have joined up with a vintage machine group on facebook, despite the fact that my Necchi is from the 80’s & broken, and my Sewcraft is a Singer 15 clone and not an actual “Singer” machine.

Repeatedly, daily, hourly sometimes, there are facebook posts about this craigslist ad, that ad, this treadle, that cabinet, & so on.

I am sorta overwhelmed by it at times, but also sorta encouraged at times by this group.

After a comment about metal polish, I decided to take my saturday ‘strange cleaning project’ as the little metal plate on my Singer 15 sewing machine.

Here’s a close up of my hard work.

For comparison, here is the machine when I first oiled her this past summer.

I used some Brasso I forgot we had that had been sitting for years untouched. A toothbrush & Q-tips, and a soft microfiber cloth to polish up the metal seal.

And of course I oiled her & started thinking about using this machine more. But the name – “ol Blue” was cool, but not quite good enough yet.

And then also prompted from a comment about the machine name on the same vintage facebook group, I made a name decision. Exciting, I know.

I was mentioning I liked the idea of water / ocean with “old blue” and someone said – Ariel.  Which feels / felt almost right.

So I remembered the very annoying song where they sing ‘We are the daughters of Triton, great father who loved us & named us well …” in the original The Little Mermaid movie – something I watched obsessively growing up.

And yes, watching the video will mean the song will be stuck in your head for two weeks too, right?

And I started looking up & researching the Disney Little Mermaid Ariel’s sisters.

Did you know there were 2 other movies made about TLM? I didn’t. But did you know there was a Disney wiki about the sister’s of Ariel?

I used the knowledge from that site & fact that my sewcraft is ocean blue to name my machine after the blue brunette of Ariel’s sister who is a little OCD.

So meet – Aquata!

And after all this thinking & cleaning, I decided to use this machine for what its best purpose – it’s a great FMQ machine.

So I got out my very “oldest” UFO. and This thing has been ready for a while – even spray basted 2 years ago, just waiting for FMQ.

And that’s what you see happening here (if you can – white on white doesn’t show that much.

And there are some circles in the center. I am kinda making this up as I go along.

And I wish I had made this orange peel done in red instead of white. I may over quilt the orange peels in the center of the red squares with red & see how they look.

I find the FMQ very fun to do with Aquata. I go rather fast on the ‘knee pedal’ and so my stitches are tiny and will be a bugger to remove if I need to, but it quilts so smoothly that way. Faster foot, slower hands right?

One more thing I thought about with my cone that I’ve been using to quilt. The cone thread sits so much higher than the top of my machine, and it likes to “jump the track” on my singer 15 clone.

So I came up with a solution. A strong magnet & a small binder clip!