Dec 26 09

Salvation!

salvation-end-pic

Sometimes, I learn a lot by making a mistake, and the center of this quilt is a good example of that. I had thrown a couple of Amish quilts together so I’d have somewhere to stitch out some new feathered border designs after the first of the year. The quilt center of this one also mattered because I wanted to stitch a feathered “frame” for that center wreath. Well, I was in such a hurry that I raced through the initial stitching without giving a thought to thread choices..big mistake! I ended up with this:

cool amish quilt 2

BOOORRRIINNNGGGG!! Oh my gosh, what was I thinking? Everything just kind of runs together and you really can’t appreciate the frame at all! So, the only way to solve this was to get myself back in there with some other thread colors to achieve better definition of all of these “zones” of quilting that contribute to the overall design. My first step was to hyperquilt the 4 corner feathered designs: (BTW, notice that all of these pictures are a bit distorted; it’s the only way I can upload a full size pic into this updated version of wordpress):

salvation-1

That helped, but not nearly enough, so I hyperquilted the entire frame:

salvation-2

…and that was a big step forward. Next up, I echo-quilted the center wreath with a few rows of another color thread. I always love how this adds a “halo of color” around a wreath, and then I quilted the inside of the wreath with a background fill design. At this point, I was hoping I could get away without quilting a background fill design outside the wreath, but I ended up adding that later on:

salvation-3b

And here it is as I’m hyperquilting the center wreath with turquoise thread, stitching single curly cues inside each plume:

salvation-4

And the final center block is done. It looks a lot better, but if I could start over from scratch, I’d use some different colors from the get-go:

salvation-end-pic

4 Comments

  1. Virginia Says:

    Boring to Spectacular in 4 easy steps. Thanks for sharing. I love your techniques.

  2. Sally Says:

    I think it looks great! BTW, I even liked in what you considered the “boring” stage. Sally

  3. Becky Says:

    I thought it looked good in the first (boring) picture, too. The step by step pictures show the evolution from pretty to spectacular! Beautiful quilting.

  4. Dorothy Says:

    Dear Patsy,
    I am in ore of your skills as I am very much a novice. The addition of different coloured thread has certainly made a remarkable change to the original design.
    I also like the way you outlined the feathers then filled the feathers with curliques.
    I hope one day to quilt half as well.Well done!
    Kind regards,
    Dorothy