Triple Constellation Part C

Well, the top is finished and the thread colours are chosen... as soon as I'm done with the current foot attachment on my machine, the free-motion foot will go on and I'll look for inspiration on how to quile this last part. Stay tuned!

Triple Constellation Part B - Lines

I love contrast in quilting, so to go with the all-over-the-place, different-size bubbles, I decided on a parallel grid pattern. I didn't want the pattern to be too ridgid, so left out every 3rd line, ending up with 2" - 1" - 2" - 1" etc. in between quilt lines. I simply used masking tape to mark the quilt lines and quilted along either side of the tape.

Using the tape was much easier than marking all the lines with a pen and then having to get rid of the markings later. The method uses up a lot of masking tape, but I simply reused small bits that I had left over from taping quilt backings to the floor for basting. After a while, these bits aren't strong enough anymore to hold the quilt backing to the floor (too much fuzz collects on them), but they're fine to string together for marking a quilt line...

Whenever possible, I simply lifted the needle and foot and moved across to the next seam without cutting the thread. This reduces the chance of thread-ends balling up or getting tangled when starting a new quilt line with loose thread ends.

View from the under side, all finished and squared up.

And the front...

Once all three parts are ready, I will decide on the binding colour... whether to match each quilt or use the same colour to link the 3 parts together...

Triple Constellation Part B - Bubbles

Next comes Part B. I decided to do bubbles in the circles this time. The plan is to use different quilting styles and combinations on each part of the wall-hanging.

The bubbles pattern is one of my favourite free-motion quilting patterns. Especially on a small section such as this, it's a lot of effect for relatively little work.

I want to bounce on these!

A little oopsie-daisy happened about 5 seconds into free-motion quilting. I missed a pin, it snuck up from behind the foot and caught me so unawares that I quilted right over it. Unfortunately in such a way (as you can see) that I couldn't simply fiddle the needle out. What a pain to have to cut the threat after 5 cm of quilting! But hey, I'm glad my needle didn't break when it hit the pin... 

Next up: the background quilting on Part B.

Triple Constellation Part A

Progress on a WIP to report! Woot woot! First though: a refresher -->

This part of the three-part wall hanging has been done for a while. I tried to use thread and quilting to make the 3/4 circles look like almost full circles, fading the clearly delineated missing quarter into the background. However, short of quilting that part of the quilt into a solid brick, I gave up trying. There was just too much light-dark contrast to bridge, and it may have needed fabric paint or something, and I'm not really interested in trying that...

Here is the back, you can see what I mean about trying to soften the transition from background fabric to circle fabric.

Snooty cat revived

Ages - and I mean AGES - ago, I started a quilt that went awry. The Snooty Cat Quilt. Last posted about over 4 years ago (when I described my dilemma in detail).

The other day, I got out the pieces and thought, what the heck. They're cut wrong and don't fit and don't make exactly the patter I planned back then, BUT, they'll make some kind of pattern, and who cares anyway!

So I started sewing them together. So what if the diagonals in the rectangles don't meet the corners of the center square...

The basic pattern is still there, I get to use up this line of fabric, and best of all, I'm quilting :)

Besides this project on the go, I am hand-quilting the first of those 2 baby quilts (the dark one) and making a little iCover for one of those Apple products :)

Happy quilting!

Treasure Treadle

This is unfortunately not mine. I found it when I checked out the apartment next to my grandparents. It's being renovated after the previous tenant died of old age, and some of his stuff is still there, including this old Singer sewing machine. I've seen people rave about these treadles on quilting blogs but don't know anything about them myself. I like he idea of sewing without electricity, though...

Border choices

These quilts definitely need peppy borders, they're too dull, not enough popping colour in them.

I've experimented with some colours, trying to pick up the red in one of the fabrics.

Nice match for the orange-red in the colourful square

Too dull

Too red

Too busy

First one it is then :)

And for the other (light version) quilt, something to pick up the green squares would be good. Let's see what the stash has to offer!