I’m in the Mood for Quilting!
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!
