July 31, 2015

Free Motion Quilting

Hello again!

I seem to keep gushing about so many new and exciting (to me) things lately, and I'm going to share another with you today.  Having recently finished my Red Velvet layer cake quilt top, I'd been feeling a little gun shy at the prospects of starting quilting.  But I finally knuckled down and put together some small practise squares, beginning with some meander/stipple quilting and then doing some border doodle designs.

I managed to get my Ricky Tims harmonic convergence wallhanging spray basted without the help of Greta (cat) and then I was good to go!  I decided on a medium-sized meander in the central base of the wallhanging so as to catch all of those seams and to soften the harsh straight lines.


I used a turquoise thread with good contrast against the different fabrics, which was a tip I picked up from one of the FMQ resources I've been trolling recently in preparation for this next step - it definitely helped me to see where I had already sewn, which was a huge help and very useful.  I also really like the look of contrast threads so that made for an added bonus.


In the inner border, I decided on this cute doodle line - I love how playful and whimsical it looks.

Now my next step is trying to decide what to do for the quilting in the outer borders, which feature little hanging mugs.  I would love to trace quilt around each of the mugs, but my FMQ isn't very precis quite yet (although if I do all of them, I'm sure it will improve rapidly!)

And finally, I was looking around for some quilting glove options.  I haven't seen any actual marketed quilting gloves in my area but I did notice this neat gardening gloves at my local grocery store:


They're cotton with a textured rubber on the palms and fingers and man do they grip the fabric!  And the best part, they were a mere 20:kr SEK ($3.00 CAD) - sweet!

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