As is true for any skill,
if you want to get good at quilting, you need to quilt – at least a little bit
every day. I haven’t been doing that,
and I think that’s the reason for being stifled about finishing several tops
that are pin basted. I don’t know what I
want to do and I am hesitant, because I am afraid of messing them up.
I have always had a
sandwiched smaller square handy on which to warm up, check tension and practice
patterns. Recently, I made up a bunch of
them and have practiced at least 15 minutes every day. What I notice is that even a jumble of
different patterns has its certain charm – so maybe I shouldn’t be so gripped
about what pattern to use, just letting my mood guide me. Maybe there is such a thing as too much
planning. I love feathers and they take a lot of practice, so I always work on several every session.
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| Somehow this hodgepodge looks good to me. |
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| Combing several patterns together |
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| Paisley and feathers are similar and can be combined to good effect! |
So yesterday I dug out a
bunch of really bad batik fat quarters I had bought a long time ago from
Joann’s. I had a left over chunk of
batting from another project and I have a bunch of cotton polyester fabric I
bought at an estate sale (I bought 21 yards of fabric for 4$!) In the course of 2 hours I had created a
simple 3’ by 4’ top and pin basted it. I also found some inexpensive polyester
embroidery thread that quilts quite well.
Now I have something large-ish to play with. When it’s done, I think I’ll go ahead and
bind it and throw it in the car – it can be used for back seat naps as well as
padding for transporting delicate stuff.
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| My practice quilt. |
Besides regularly
visiting Leah Day’s and Dianne Gaudynski’s sites, I have been recently taking a
Craftsy class from Angela Walters on quilting negative spaces. Right now I am fooling around with outlining
smaller areas to fill in. Her example uses
overlapping rectangular tiles, but I am experimenting with the same technique
using circles as well as irregular shapes.
This definitely has some possibilities.
I am figuring out what needs marking and what doesn’t as well. The outer circle and its echo look better if I mark them, for example. The photo below is the quilting from the back, which shows up better.
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| Stacked circles from the back. |
Yesterday I bought some
Fine Line rulers and am playing with their use as well for doing both straight
line and curved cross hatching. I am
having a lot of fun, feel more confident and now am looking forward to working
on finishing those waiting tops…