Dritz

Another post from the 2012 FMQ Challenge hosted by SewCalGal. Can you tell I’m trying to clean my slate for the new year? 😀

Teri Lucas presented a tutorial based on using software like Kaleidoscope to deconstruct images into kaleidoscopes and using the images in quilting. Kaleidoscope looks reasonable and fun to use, but it is a Windows program and I’m on a Mac. But Teri provided a pdf of the following block for us to practice quilting. I do love this block. The colors are some of my favorites.

I used Dritz Inkjet Printable Fabric in a Canon printer to create the fabric. The quilting was done on a Bernina 820 with YLI Silk thread in a pinkish taupe. I started with a tension close to one. Then I dropped the tension again. I was still seeing threads pulling on curves and dropped the tension to .5 which seemed to work. The thread broke on me once during the quilting, which is better luck with silk than I have had in the past. I believe I lowered tension to .5 after the thread broke.

My echoing and stippling need work and this was a good piece to practice on. This is a great piece to use for practicing feathers. I’ve got to do a few more like this.

I’m trying to decide what to make out of this piece and may use it on a bag.

Thanks to Teri Lucas for sharing her expertise and her time with us during this challenge. This was a really fun and useful exercise. As always, kudos to SewCalGal for putting this together.

Anyone wanting to broaden their free motion quilting experience should really take a look at the tutorials still on line while they’re still there. Incredible value.

Just for the record, I’m blogging backwards. This quilt was begun in January 2012 and finished in April.

I recently created a quilt for Victoria, a friend of my daughter. They both are in art school and Victoria sent me a stool she had painted which I use in my sewing room. I’m showing you two different angles to show off some of the detail and variety she put into this piece. I decided to create a throw for her as a thank you. And let me say, it got a little out of hand. It finished closer to a twin size than a throw.

I discovered Jennifer Haynen’s Happy fabrics and they really reminded me of Victoria’s style. I started creating half square triangles with the idea of piecing randomly. It really gave me fits when it came time to laying out the pattern and I never really liked it until after I quilted it. And let me tell you, I hate working on something that I don’t love.

This was the third quilt that I free motion quilted and the first quilt larger than a baby quilt. Below are some shots of detail within many of the blocks. I stalked blogs like Angela Walters’ ‘Quiltingismytherapy’ and borrowed styles from Leah Day’s quilting design books and basically just played. Quilting this was the most fun in the whole process.

The quilting went much better than I expected. I have seen improvement with each quilt, so even though I can spot problems, I am really happy to have made such progress. I’m quilting this on a Bernina 820 and I believe I used Isacord thread. I really should have posted this sooner or made better notes.

This is the finished quilt. You can see many of the broken patterns in this quilt and may understand why I wasn’t very happy with the way this was piecing. The truth on this quilt is I had it laid out to look looked like broken circles…a lot like the top of the quilt. I was working on a cutting mat on the floor and killing my back. I had the bright idea to pick up the mat and move the quilt. You know what happened…the pieces went everywhere. I never got it back like it was. So this is what I had and it wasn’t until I got a black binding on this quilt that I really liked it. Unfortunately, you can’t really see it in these photos. It really helped the black pieces on the bottom to fall into place.

On a side note, I was really excited with some of the resulting practice sandwiches. Because I had so many fabrics and I was playing with thread colors and designs, I had pieced scrap fabrics of many of my main fabrics to play with. Basically I practiced designs I planed to use on certain fabrics to make sure they didn’t clash with fabric pattern. And of course, I played with thread choices. Below are two of the main sandwiches I ended up with.

The bottom right two photos show the front and back of the pieces I was working on. I realized as I was working on these they would make a great iPad zip case. Once I finished the quilt, these pieces were fully quilted. I added fabric flowers onto the front, reinforced a piece of the yellow fabric with Dritz InnerFuse for a divider, inserted a zipper and sewed it all together. I am really pleased with it. It is always fun to make something useful out of those practice pieces.