Finally Back to Normal

Whew!  This has been a long and highly stressful past few months.  Much of it was spent out of town caring for ill parents, and a fair amount of it was spent feeling crappy with respiratory tract infections from being so tired and sleep deprived.  We are finally back home and both our moms are doing well, so we can breathe a sigh of relief.  Yesterday was the first time I’ve free motion quilted since mid-November, (if you’ve taken a class with me in this time, I’m not counting classes) and it felt so good to be back at my sewing machine once again.  I am hoping to spend a lot of time in my sewing room over the next couple of months!  If you’ve emailed me and haven’t heard back, it’s because  my life has been on hold while caring for out-of-town family.  I am way behind on every part of my life and it will take me awhile to get caught up, but I’m making progress.

I have a few photos of things I worked on last November just before my life took a tumble.  One was a Christmas-themed table runner I made:

The “framework” for the quilting was all done as ruler work.  This part went very quickly and this next shot shows one of the reasons why.  If you are a lazy quilter like me, ruler work enables you to get by with minimal marking.  You can see this in the photo below.  Those temporary blue dots are the starting and stopping points for the curves that I wanted to create using rulers.  That long straight blue line is simply the “midpoint” line that keeps me on target for using that as my midpoint:

Here’s another after I was a bit further along:

Notice that many spaces are simply filled with small featherettes.  If you go into the design with the goal if completely filling the area with a featherette, you end up with symmetric-appearing featherettes, even thogh they aren’t truly symmetric.  Here’s a closeup shot of a center section:

Do you have a little sense of deja-vu when you see this table runner?

If so, it’s because I made another table runner using this same pattern earlier last fall.  Here’s a shot of it:

Both are quilted using ruler work and featherettes, but the quilting on each one is different:

I call it the Swirly Floral Quartet Table Runner and it’s made using machine embroidery applique.  The CD for it is now available by clicking here . If you don’t want the whole CD, the downloadable version is available by clicking here.

Filed under Free Motion Quilting, ruler work on a HDSM, Store Updates. 4 Comments