Quilting on Dress Quilt

Here is the promised post on the quilting designs used on my dress quilt.

I thought a lot about what to put on this quilt.  Over the years I had tried a variety of designs, some with easy to use marking tools that rubbed off, others required scrubbing.  Nothing pleased me and so I kept placing the top back in the fabric cupboard until guilt would make me drag it out again.  This year, I'm determined to get rid of the unnecessary stress of having unfinished projects, either I hand it on or complete it.  So far, I've had a lot of success.

What made this work for me?   I took pictures of the quilt and drew designs on the printed copies.  Over and over again, I tried.

This has become my motto and I repeat it until I believe that I will succeed.

Here are the designs that got chosen.  I used a long arm machine for the feathers and then a walking foot on my domestic machine for the straight lines.  This was my first and definitely not my last attempt at quilting feathers.  To see the quilt click here.

 A simple star pattern for the nine patch.

The nine patch variation with four patch corners got a feather treatment.

The rail fence received easy up and down straight lines.   The lines were marked using painters tape which worked really well.

The friendship star also got feathers.  The thread often broke when I went over the same spot as the intersection of 5 pieces of fabric and so I learnt the hard way to move the quilting line just slightly away from that point.

I drew my signature heart on the log cabin.  I've been dotting the i in my last name with a heart for many years now.

The final block in the sampler quilt is the flying geese which had more feathers.  Seams appropriate, no?

I hope this gives you ideas for your own quilts.  I'd love to see any you are working on.

Luv pauline

Feather Design 1 with Variations

I started drawing Evil Cat using my daughter's very, very, very old Wacom tablet.  I've used it twice before.  Once, I followed instructions from a youtube video and created a great tree.  Next use, I figured I had all the skills and so I just went for it.  Unfortunately, a  lot of shaky blobs appeared on the screen and nothing else.  This time, I figured it couldn't be too hard to trace an image.  Turns out I don't have the skill set for that either.  However, I can draw quilting feathers with it.  I'm very excited to show you my first attempts.

Okay, let me be honest, I had fun playing with the paint bucket in photoshop which is why the above images are  coloured differently in each quadrant

More of the same but just reflecting the image through different locations.  This was very easy to do and I hope it inspires you to get designing.

Luv pauline