No-Frills Quilting
August 26th, 2013
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!
Good for health! Generic viagra lowest prices. Each of them has been approved by Indian FDA and also certified internationally.
