After I finished up my last batch of clothing, I thought I might try to finish up some other projects that have been laying around for quite a while. I have at least 5 quilt tops and at least 5 pillows-to-be. The pillows are sandwiched and ready to quilt, so I thought that would be pretty easy to tackle. I did the first one with my usual stippling, but I got kind of bored with that and thought I should branch out into some different types of quilting.
I did a bit of googling and came across a pretty cool site that I had seen before, The Free Motion Quilting Project. I'm sure you've probably heard of it before, but she has like a gazillion different types of quilting each with a handy-dandy uTube video to help you figure out how to do it. How generous is that?!
I wanted to try a whole bunch of them, but I didn't want to just practice and then throw my practice piece away. I mean, what if I liked how it came out? So before I knew it, another project was born (without finishing a single UFO). I can't seem to find it again now, but I remember seeing some cute, simple pillows on the Oh, Fransson blog. They were just made up of four solid squares with different quilting in each one.
I decided to do the same thing.
I think I would have liked it better if I had just made 4 squares, but I made them too small to make even a very small pillow, so I added the border. It worked out okay because it gave me two more quilt patterns to try.
Here are the different quilting patterns I tried with the links to The Free Motion Quilting Project web site for that pattern.
Top Left - Angles and Circles
Top Right - Paisley
Bottom Left - Pebbles
Bottom Right - Desert Sand
Left & Right Borders - Echo Rainbow
Bottom and Top Borders - Rain Forest Leaf
My favorite one to actually sew was Rain Forest Leaf, but the one I like the look of best is the pebbles. I can't quite get my head around how any of these might fit into a quilt with lots of prints. I like the way stippling makes all the different fabrics seem to melt together, and I feel like some of the other patterns I tried will either take away from the printed fabrics or the printed fabrics would hide the cool quilting designs. I guess the trick is to find the right combination.
But I'm over my little dalliance with quilting and ready to get back to sewing clothes again. So much for those UFO's!
I did get a photo of Addie in the latest shirt I made for her. I made her model it with the scarf because, as my husband pointed out, without that, it looks a little like Sam Adams' shirt - yeah - the beer guy. He's kind of right. Arggh.
