Aug 26 13
No-Frills Quilting
I call this quilt “Tick-Tack-Tulip” because it reminds me of a tick-tack-toe game. It’s a 2-block quilt made from the Appli-K-Kutz Plume Family, Tulips, and Stylized Stems 2 dies. It stitches up pretty quickly and I was excited as I was making it because the colors are very bright and the whole quilt makes me feel happy. (Isn’t it weird how some quilts leave you feeling hapier than others? I digress…) I basted it and did all the stitch-in-the ditch and applique-outline stitching really quickly, and was looking forward to trying some fun new quilting things on it. Didn’t quite work out that way, though. This was all a couple of months ago and I figured it would be totally done about 1 month ago but I hadn’t even had time to touch it again by then. Not sure what’s going on, but I just keep getting further and further behind and there seems to be less and less time to quilt…how does this happen? I feel like the past 6 months have been one very long lesson that I just can’t juggle as many things as I used to, and I need to stop trying. I digress yet again…
Back to the Tick-Tack-Tulip quilt..I really did need to just get this thing quilted, so I started by quilting the rudimentary version of “plumify-it” as my background fill design. Here’s what a tulip block looks like quilted:
I’ve used this block in lots of things, so I’ve quilted this block many, many times. Each time, I am always struck by the fact that there’s kind of a secondary design formed near the center. Here’s what I mean:
That center part makes me think of 4 hearts and/or 4-leaf clovers. I may go back in later on and stitch another design inside those 4 center ‘hearts,” but in the interest of moving on to the next quilt, this will stay as-is for the time being. (Isn’t it awful when you have fun ideas but all you have time for is no-frills quilting?) Here’s what one of the wreaths look like with the background quilting (notice that the centers were left empty as I thought I’d go back and do something fun there):
In the end, I ran out of time and ended up just quilting the center sections with that same background fill design (I’m sounding like a broken record here):
I did pairs of feathers that splayed from the center in the outer borders and a variant of a loop-d-loop border design in the narrow inner border:
I was up against a deadline so this quilt was actually bound before the quilting was done. Here’s a shot of it on a chair in the family room (Haven’t gotten a shot of the whole quilt hanging on the wall yet):
I have a second one that’s waiting to be quilted but this time, it will be by someone else. (I can only have 1 bite per quilt at the quilting apple!) The color really isn’t right on this second sample of the Tick-Tack-Toe quilt, the background is a light turquoise:
Can’t wait to see what it looks like when it’s done!
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Patsy, as always your quilting is just beautiful. The quilt blocks are stunning without the quilting and then you take it up to the next level. Thanks for sharing with us…
Just gorgeous! I never can get enough of your colors. I do love that secondary design too – and this is lovely quilting for “no frills” quilting!!! 🙂