Patsy Thompson Designs, Ltd.

Borders and Ruler Work

April 18th, 2016

I just couldn’t seem to take any good photos today, so “sorry,” right off the bat! I think I could spend my whole life playing around quilting different border designs using ruler work. The shot above shows a border I stitched this afternoon and all you need to make a border like this is a plain old every day arc ruler. I started off by creating an arched swag border and then added a scant 1/4 inch channel inside:

I needed my next channel to be super wide because I knew I wanted to stitch a curved featherette inside it. None of my rulers had markings that would allow me to make a channel wide enough, but it was easy to come up with a work-around. In this next shot, you can see that there are 3 markings (see the tiny white lines by the 3 arrows):

Using these as my starting and stopping points, I was able to stitch out a 1 1/4 inch wide channel. Once it was done, I added another scant 1/4 inch channel below it:

Voila! My ruler work framework is completely stitched! Next up, I stitched an elongated featherette inside my extra wide channel. I do this using the bumpback method for stitching a feather and my goal is to fill the channel completely with my plumes. Here’s what my arched swag border looked like at this point:

If you look closely inside those swags, you will see a vertical center line and a horizontal soap line that’s 3/4 inches from the seam line. The center line will help keep my lower design centered and the horizontal line tells me how high up to stitch the tips of my swirls. Here is what they look like once completely done:

Gosh, it felt good to have some quilting time again! Here’s one last shot of a few of them, although the photo’s not so great:

If you don’t know how to make bumpback feathers, it’s a really, really useful skill to have. I go over it a lot in my Craftsy class on feathers called Ultimate Feather Quilting, (click here for a discount link to that class), but here is a short video where I explain it while drawing one out:

Filed under Craftsy!, Free Motion Quilting, Machine Embroidered Applique, ruler work on a HDSM. 4 Comments

Incredible Class!

March 15th, 2016

OMG, OMG, OMG!! I am so excited by this new Craftsy class I started watching this week! Have you seen “Wild Quilting” by Christina Cameli yet? There is something about Christina’s style of teaching that is so warm and inviting that just draws you in. Once you start watching, the real hook is all the ways she creates beautiful combinations of free motion quilting designs! Her ideas are so fresh and invigorating that you just want to run to your machine to start playing around. So, so much fun! Her samples are yummy and you’ll find yourself drooling over them but the best part is that this is not rocket science! Honestly, her designs are very do-able by just breaking them down into parts. You can find Christina’s class by clicking here and I promise that you’ll be glad that checked it out! Can’t wait to start playing with some of her ideas!!

Filed under Craftsy!, Free Motion Quilting. 5 Comments

I’m in the Mood for Quilting!

December 28th, 2015

I had a wonderful time with family for Christmas and now I am SO psyched to get back to some quilting! Remember this guy:

My plan was to have this top quilted in time to enter it in the Asheville quilt show last September. I started quilting as soon as it was basted and it was one of 4 huge projects that I had going from early spring to the end of October this past year. My 4 projects were:

1. Design and shoot a new Craftsy class about feathers (Done and launched on October 12, 2015! Click here for a link for a $20 discount off my Ultimate Free Motion Feathers Craftsy Class.)

2. Design and shoot a new DVD about ruler work for the sit down quilter (Done and launched on October 9th, 2015! Click here to see a preview video clip of the DVD.)

3. Study, study, study and then take my internal medicine re-certification exam (Done and taken on October 26, 2015! I am still waiting to find out if I passed or not, though, and they have until Feb 6 to announce the results. Why the heck does it take so darn long?!!)

4. Quilt the above quilt by September 10, 2015…not done. Bummer. I got to 4 weeks before this quilt was due to be finished and had all these other balls in the air and realized that I could either bust my butt finishing the quilting and not really enjoy the process vs forget about the deadline and finish the quilting at a pace that would allow me to enjoy the process. To me, the whole point of making quilts is about enjoying the process, so I forgot about meeting that 4th deadline and I’m SO glad I did! This quilt has been SO much fun to work on and that is the “story” that will forever live in my head when I look at this quilt in years to come. Today, I will start posting about the wonderful time I’ve had with this quilt and I’ll start with some photos of the center block:

I always start a quilt like this by SID quilting followed by outlining all the applique shapes with invisible thread. Once that has been done, I try to add some free motion quilting motifs that “play off” some of the applique shapes. An example is the “Aztec plumes” that spring from around the sides of the heart:

(They were originally stitched in a purple thread, then hyperquilted with turquoise.) There is also a small featherette that was quilted just above the heart, springing from the heart’s “cleavage.” I love the embroidery at the base of the heart. The heart is not trapuntoed, but it looks as if it is. Here are a few more pics of this area:

and

The birds have some free motion quilted plumes that spring from each side and those were also hyperquilted with gold thread to make them “pop” just a tad bit more:

I love the 3-D effect of the machine embroidery applique. This tangential shot of some of the feathers gives a better sense of how they almost seem trapuntoed:

In this shot, you can see the only ruler work that was done in this section of the quilt. I used a straight line ruler to quilt some channels in the 2 side corners and then filled in one channel with arow of pearls. I filled the “empty triangles” with small featherettes:

The flower/stem unit at the base of the block is really a staylized “fantasy flower:”

I love how the candlewicking stitch that surrounds the stem looks as if beads have been added to the perimeter of the stem. I really over-use that decorative stitch but it’s my favorite stitch of all so I always get sucked into using it. Here’s a closeup of the flower section:

Again, I’m a total sucker for all this darn TEXTURE!! Just a couple more shots…this is the large straight feather at the top of the block:

(This feather color is way off…it’s a pink/magenta in real life.) And this last shot is a good closeup of the embroidered head feathers of the birds…love how that came out:

I hope you’ve enjoyed this center block section. I’ll do another couple of posts to move further away from the center. I just love, love, love how this quilt is coming along!

Filed under Craftsy!, Free Motion Quilting, Machine Embroidered Applique. 4 Comments

Merry Christmas!

December 21st, 2015

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you, wherever you are and whatever holiday you celebrate! Did you know that Craftsy is having a huge sale with up to 50% off many classes? They sure are, and the sale runs from now through Saturday December 26th.

Click here for a link to the sale classes!

Filed under Craftsy!. 1 Comment

Part 2 of 2nd Westalee Circle Ruler Work Experiment

November 27th, 2015

When I left off on the last post about this design, we’d competed the quilting on the center portions of all the circle areas and were ready to move ahead. This is where we finished up last time:

Using the faint soap lines in the photo above, as well as new soap lines marking the center between each existing pair of soap lines, it’s pretty easy to start creating new designs that spring from the outside of the current design. Even though it isn’t a circle anymore, if you keep working with it as if it’s still a circle, you can elaborate on that circular symmetry. I used one of the Quilters Groove Arc Rulers to stitch the arcs below that kind of bow inward, but you could do the same thing using any arc ruler:

(The way I made them all the same height was I figured out what the longest height possible was to allow me an empty binding zone, and then made a small mark at that point all around the circle.) Next up, I stitched arcs bowing outward in between each of these. Again, these are made in similar ways and the result is determined by the direction you place the arc in before you start stitching:

Now for some fun fill-in work! I started by stitching small featherettes inside the short/wide arches and used a turquoise rayon thread to make sure the detail would show. If you go into this kind of fill-in work with the goal of taking up all available space, they go pretty quickly and appear fairly symmetric. If you are new to this kind of work and want to learn how to do it, the stitching of featherettes is taught in my DVD called Ruler Work for the Sit-Down Quilter and also in my newest Craftsy class called Ultimate Free Motion Feathers. (Here’s a permanent link for a $20 discount for that class.) Here’s what those arches look like once filled:

I swapped threads and loaded a light lavender into the top needle to create the featherettes inside the remaining arches. Here’s a shot once all those were stitched:

I then threw in the “fingertips” design inside the 1/2 inch channel in the shorter/wider arches. I really like how it forms the sense of a continuous ring even though it is repeatedly interrupted by the other arches:

…and here’s a closeup so you can see the differences in the featherettes more clearly:

Notice how 95% of my “fill-in” designs are featherettes, yet they don’t feel “old” or over-used because each zone of featherettes is a little different from the neighboring one. That is something I really love about featherettes. All it takes is a minor change in proportion or to throw in a new element (i.e. a swirl, etc), and you’ve got a design that looks new and fresh. I had to go back in and add hyperquilting into at least 1 of the outer arches. Here’s a closeup where only one featherette has been hyperquilted and I think you’ll see how much it adds:

I finished up by hyperquilting the remaining featherettes in that one zone of arches, then added “plumify it” as my background fill design outside of the enchilada:

Again, designs like this that appear complex are really not so tough if you can envision them as component parts and just work on one area at a time. Happy belated Thanksgiving and I hope you are surrounded by family and friends. Thanks so much for taking the time to read my blog…you are the whole reason it exists!

Filed under Craftsy!, Free Motion Quilting, ruler work on a HDSM. 4 Comments

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