Some Finishes!

Here's the first installment, more to follow later today and tomorrow :)

Ginny explained a great way of hanging quilts to me: these clip-on curtain rings! No more quilts on the floor as the only photo-position! I went straight to the store and got a loooong (86") curtain rod and clip-on curtain rings. Wish they'd have had a curtain rod colour other than gold, though...

Here is the finished batik 9-patch baby quilt.


Without the flash, the different patterns really come out!


I was happy to get all your positive comments about how much you liked the different free-motion blocks!

Baby Batik 9-Patch Part 3 (of 3)

Last installment of the free-motion quilting on my batik 9-patch baby quilt:

I was excited about this one because I work with mussels!

"Mussel Shell"

Hey, I didn't come up with the name :) I guess I can see the bananas now...

"Swirling Bananas"

"Etch 'n' Sketch"

On the border I just did a random, attached-to-each-other swirls pattern, let's call it my own creation and forget that many quilters probably have done something very similar...



And what does the whole quilt look like?

Front:

Back:

I left the 9-patches entirely unquilted, partly because I was utterly done quilting this quilt, and partly because I wanted it to be a little bit fluffy and soft and not just stiff!

Seeing that I'm currently stippling a quilt (though not allover :), I guess I haven't branched out too far yet. If I have a quilt whose layout lends itself to some of these filler designs, I'll definitely experiment some more! How about "stomach lining" all over a quilt, starting in the middle??? Haha, maybe if I rename it ;)

Baby Batik 9-Patch Part 2

I'm glad you guys liked the free-motion designs I blogged about so far! Here are the next few designs I tried on the batik 9-patch baby quilt.

This one makes me think of blown glass, and it's called...

"Flowing Glass"

I'm glad there wasn't a spider on the web as well - I hate spiders!

"Spider Web"

Maybe something useful for a Christmas quilt???

"Poinsettia"

"Shadow Waves"

I love the look of this one, though it doesn't make for a soft quilt - very dense quilting and time consuming!

"Pebbles in a Stream"

"Basic Spiral"

Which one do you like best so far?

Baby Batik 9-Patch Part 1

My baby batik 9-patch is done. It's a pretty involved quilt, so I'll feed it to you in piece-meal :) I'll have to savour the quilting on this quilt!

It all started with me finding this awesome free-motion quilting blog: http://freemotionquilting.blogspot.com/ by Leah Day. She challenged herself to create/showcase one free-motion filler design (to cover large areas) a day for a year. Some of the designs are very similar, others are really amazing. Here you can see all of the designs she has come up with or described so far.

Because I'm a scientist, I was lured in by the design she calls "Stomach lining", so I did this one on my first background block in the batik 9-patch:

"Stomach Lining"

It was really easy, so I went ahead and picked other motives I liked and zoomed through them!

"Sea Anemone"

"Swirling Flames"

"Elodea"

Now, I thought these designs would be difficult, but I basically just had her example up on the computer screen as reference and went ahead. Sometimes I'd watch her video to see how she does a particularly tricky part, other times I just did the whole design from memory (and it turned out slightly different, of course :)

I found traveling (=stitching pack over a quilting line to get to a different place in the design) tricky at times, especially when I was going too fast - because in that case, there were 5 stitches off the original path, instead of just 1 or 2.

Also, I had a really hard time with skipped stitches, where your needles goes through the fabric several times and just doesn't pick up the bobbin thread from the bottom. I've blogged about this problem before and have figured out that there are two reasons this happened for me:

1) my needle was dull and the wrong size. I've since bought a quilting needle (I think it's an 11 or 14 in size) instead of the massive universal needles I used before - what a difference.

2) I had this problem especially when going through seams, the bulkier, the worse it got. Now whenever I get to a really bulky seam and need to quilt over it, I just go extremely slowly, sometimes just turning the knob to make the needle go up and down, then lifting the foot and moving the fabric, foot down, another stitch. It goes a lot faster than having to rip out stitches and requilt them!

In addition, I found out that dark thread is heavier than light thread because there's more dye in it. That was a big problem when I started the wormy-apple-quilt, because I tried to match threads. Well, no more! :)

I learned a lot about tension problems in free-motion quilting (leading to skipped stitches in my case) on Leah Day's blog (a whole post about skipping stitches!) and on Diane Gaudinsky's blog (here, here, and in the comments here).

Tomorrow, an update on the modified log cabin quilt, then you'll get the next few designs I tried on the batik 9-patch!

I'm Hopeless ;)

Yup. Again. I couldn't believe it either.

I once again didn't notice for a whole long quilting session that the backing fabric had folded over and was caught in the quilting...

Can I get away with "At least I haven't made this mistake with the same backing fabric?" Hahaha :)

On the bright side, I'm getting really good at taking out backing fabric without having to tear out quilting :)

Here's my technique: with the tiniest scissors I have (my 20-year-old basic Swiss army knife scissors), I cut really close to the seam, then tug on the fabric from the other side of the seam to pull it loose. It's finicky, but works quite well.


This quilt is now saved! It's the Batik 9-patch, by the way, and this will give you just a tiny sneak preview of the free motion quilting I'm doing. I'm very very excited about it, you'll see why when it's done! :)

Weekend Achievements - Batik 9 Patch

Well, I had great tips from some of my readers about how to sort my scraps. In the end, I decided to go with the 'sort by colour' theme - it just made the most sense, because just like Crispy, my previous arrangement by size didn't really make life easier.

Before I resorted the scraps, though, I figured the easiest way of dealing with them was by using them ;)


So I made a few quick 9 patch blocks with the batiks I had left over from the wedding bento box quilt and turned them into a baby-quilt:


The layout was mostly inspired by the scraps I had available, and I chose a muted background colour probably because I kept thinking of a stroller-quilt tutorial (see side bar) that I saw on Saturday and figured that for the outside, whitish backgrounds would not be very useful :)

The quilt top turned out to be approx. 34"x40".