Just More Free Motion Quilting with a Janome 1600P on a 10 foot long Grace Frame

I have a friend who quilts ALL the time. Some years ago, she did a mystery quilt on-line. This must have been at least 5 years ago, and I say this because she gave me the completed quilt top at least four years ago and possibly 5 and she had made it two or three years before that... So AT LEAST 5 years ago.

I gladly accepted it - I had only had the Janome 1600P (aka Big Martha) for a very short time and I was looking for things to practice on.

That being said, this quilt had ALOT of negative space (or plain background!) and I was a bit daunted by the prospect of quilting it.

I put it in my UFO box. Eventually, I put a piece of white, good quality, kona muslin in with it to be the backing. Every once in awhile I would take it out of the box, look at it, wonder WHAT I was going to do with it, and then I would put it back in the box.

This year I made it my mission to complete ALL my UFOs - and by UFOs, I mean, UnFinished Objects, and I limited that definition to all of the completed, but unquilted quilt tops that I had in my UFO box (which turned out, to my chagrin, to actually be TWO rubbermaid containers full of finished quilt tops.) (How embarassing!) (There were 27 quilt tops in there in various sizes.)

They are done now, and I want to talk about Ruth's Mystery Quilt.

Here it is, replete with a photo of my sleeve... Hmm. I'm not sure how that got in there... Anyway, you can see that there is a four patch border around the whole quilt. In the very centre there is a light and dark yellow thing. Can you tell what it is? I'll give you a hint. It says, "Meow!" Yes!! It is a CAT.

Here's the cat on the frame. Can you hear my brain whirring, trying to figure out WHAT I am going to quilt on that??

At this point, you can either see for yourself, or take my word for it... the quilt is not quite symmetrical.  There is A LOT of beige background fabric. Two shades of yellow (or gold, if you prefer), a black fabric with white dragonflies on it, and a solid black fabric (At least I think it is solid...) The irregular 9 patch - Big square in the middle of the block with 4 smaller squares in the black and white fabric in the four corners - is called Puss in the Corner. Which I was delighted to recognize when I finally got ready to quilt it (4 or 5 years after it was given to me! Ack!) There is a block that is a flying bird as well, I have a picture of it quilted, in a sec. I don't know the name of the block, off hand, and I haven't looked it up yet. :-)

There are some plain 6 inch squares and a small number of 6 by 12 inch rectangles in the background fabric.

I decided that I needed to use a thread that I was going to be able to see on every colour - and I went with a grey thread that reminds me of lead pencil doodling! :-)

I started with the border. I have a little pattern that is a feather with 5 or 6 or 7 fronds and an echo that I like, surrounded by bubbles. (I like to think of them as bubbles rather than pebbles, because then when they overlap a little, I can say that bubbles do that! Right?) So that is what I did in the 4 patch border. Because I do not have a long arm - and my mid-arm has 9 inches to the right of the needle, I don't have a lot of forward and backward space. This is not a problem for the borders that go from right to left, but the borders that go from front to back present a bit of a problem. Either the pattern that I choose has to be easy to stop and start, OR I have to take the quilt off and rotate it 90° when I am done the main part, to do the two side borders.

Oh, and this quilt was definitely directional. I wanted that Cat in the centre to be right side up when I got to him! He would be much easier to quilt right way up.

So - the border:

These two pictures are basically the same - just the lighting has been changed. See the little feathers? They go every which way - completely randomly. I didn't pay any attention to where they started, just when I felt like I was ready to start another one. And the bubbles separate them and fill in all the space.

Remember the cat? I decided he needed a mouse or two... Here's one. Can you see it?

He actually shows up a little better after the quilting went in below it. (There is also a butterfly in the quilt. I don't know whether I put a picture of it in here or not.)

Well, that was the easy part. What to do on the rest of the quilt... THAT was the big question. And it came to me. That cat was out in the garden!! Those birds were flying all around him, there was a mouse, and there needed to be a garden path, and lots of flowers.

I decided the four corners, inside the border, needed the garden path.

Diagonal lines are hard, and I don't have the set up to use a ruler, nor do I have any quilting rulers to use... so I just free motioned them. And then I echoed them and made a line of pebbles, and another set of diagonal lines. Swirls and pebbles made the cobble stones, and feathers with pearls finished off the corners.

Here's the before picture for another corner... see what I mean - TONS and TONS of beige fabric just waiting for quilt doodling to happen!!

The Puss in the Corner blocks I decided to do all the same.

 They were oriented in different directions, but they were all this sort of fanned out feather. It was nice to get to each of these - a block where the quilting decision had already been made! :-)

And the birds. This is the first one I did. I can tell that it is, because I decided that I did not like the way the head looked, so EVERY OTHER ONE has a different head. I decided the head was the black fabric, and the body yellow, with the wings and tail the black and white.

I thought the head would look good like that, but I changed it to a hooked spiral which reminded me of a bird's beak and head.

Here is the final bird 'pattern'. All of the rest of the flying birds looked like this.

Each 6 inch square got a different flower. I have a few flowers in my repertoire already, but by the time I got down to the far end of the quilt, I was looking for inspiration. :-)

Here are a few of the flowers I did:

You can see the border moving along in this photo too.

This left me with a few 6 by 12 inch rectangles. Two at the top, two at the bottom and two at each side. The sides and bottom I decided to try a pretty feather that I had seen. I'm not sure I quite achieved the effect that I wanted but I decided that it was good enough. With the two long rectangles on each side I had to roll the quilt forward and backward to reach all the spots. (This is always a bit tricky, because it is easy to get a bit of a pucker, but mostly because I forget that I don't have a long arm and I bounce the machine's throat off of the bar that the quilt is rolled up on... which makes an unpleasant wiggle in the quilting.)

 In the photo just above this text, you can see one vertical feather - and to the left of it, you can see the second rectangle adjacent to the finished one, not yet quilted. (The butterfly ended up at the top of the, as yet in this photo, unquilted rectangle.)

Here is a horizontal feather. By the time I would have gotten to this feather, the feather that I did first would have been rolled onto the take up bar - and I had forgotten that I had not echoed the fronds!! LOL (The quilt is so densely quilted that I don't believe you would EVER notice it if you were looking at the whole thing. I was a bit surprised to discover that I had done them differently, as I write this post!)

The top two rectangles seemed to me to be too good an opportunity to miss. So I decided to write on them, and then I quilted the background of the writing EVEN more densely. (Hard to believe that was even possible!)

 I used one of those frixion pens to print the letters on there. And then I quilted as closely as I could on the ink. Because I was going to densely quilt the background I wasn't very worried about hitting the lines exactly. And in fact, I didn't like the way the 'a' in cats looked, and I just 'fixed' it.

I found it easier for some reason to fill in the background from right to left, instead of from left to right. (The letters were already quilted at that point.)

 Almost done! (Bobbin change!)

 Quilting...

 This went through a LOT of thread!! :-)

 Cats...

 You can see where the backing shows on the take up roll - lots and lots of quilting.

And there are my words.

When I got to the cat, I had another hurdle. What to do there? The cat was very plain and blocky. I resorted to drawing on document protectors with dry erase markers to see if I could come up with an idea. And I decided the cat was not only IN a garden - he was HIDING in a garden...

So I thought about the guy in Rowan and Martin's Laugh In who was always peeking out from between long grass, saying, Very interesting... And I drew this. Notice the second mouse? Unfortunately, when I got going with the quilting that mouse got forgotten.

 I got the eyes, whiskers, nose and mouth on there without too much trouble. And more flowers and fronds. Eventually I went back and added more quilting to his forehead as well.

There is another mouse in there, on the left side of the cat, instead of the right... Can you make him out? And I put more garden path around the outside of the diamond that the cat is sitting in.

When I finished quilting this I was conflicted. I love finishing a quilt, and I was very pleased with the way it came out. But I was sad to be finished; I was having SO MUCH FUN!!!

Here are some photos of the finished quilt.

 On top of my bed, not trimmed or bound.

 Details of the back.

  Details of the back.

  Details of the back.

 I turned this photo upside down, so that you could see the words right way up.

 And the back!

And here it is, all done.

I did offer it back to my friend Ruth, but she tells me it is mine now. I just love it, and I hope you enjoyed seeing the process. Thanks for reading!
Yours in Quilting
Just Jane

Just Naughty Quilts... ever have one?

I read somewhere that there are quilters who have quilts who end up in the 'Naughty' Box.

I don't have a Naughty Box per se... but I did have a UFO box (UnFinished Objects).

Let's stop here for one second and talk about UFOs.

I have a bit of a definition for UFO - this is, for me, a quilt top that I have finished, but before I load it onto my frame to quilt, I have put it aside to start something else. (Once I have something quilted, I have never not bound it. I love binding - and once you are at that point, the quilt is so close to being finished, I can practically taste it. I never have problems with my sewing machine when I am sewing the binding on - I'm good at those cute little mitred corners, and once it is on there, then it is completely portable, and I can work on it ANYWHERE!! And then it is FINISHED!!! Did I mention that I love binding?)

I have a friend who has a different definition for a UFO. She calls a quilt top that she has lost interest in and enthusiasm for, a UFO. In her case, a UFO is often given away - someone else will have to finish that baby, she has moved on. She calls a quilt that she intends to finish, but which is waiting in the wings, so to speak, a WIP. A Work In Progress. She might have several WIPs on the go at the same time. And she might have a few UFOs - but they are waiting to be rehomed... (I like her definition... but I don't believe I have ever given a UFO away to someone else.)

Okay. I feel like that is clear now. So back to the Naughty Box.

Back in 2008, I attended a quilt show in Ottawa where I saw a wonderful quilt with Houses on it. One of the vendors was selling it as a block of the month (BoM) and I made arrangements to buy it. I suspect that Blocks of the Month work differently in different circumstances, but how this one was going to work was thusly: Each month I would receive, in the mail, a package from this quilt shop with the fabric and instructions for a block of the quilt. I believe there were 10 blocks. The LAST block would also include the fabric for the border and directions for assembling the entire quilt.

I received all 10 packages in the mail by the late spring of 2009 and in July of that year, we sold our house and moved to Nova Scotia. Eventually, I found all the bags with the patterns and fabric and put them all together in one spot. And at some point after that I numbered the bags to make sure I had them all, and put them back in that spot... Time passed as time will.

In August 2012, we had a week's holiday planned, and I collected all the parts of my BoM, packed my sewing machine and thread, my rotary cutter and mat and a pair of scissors and headed for a cottage in Ontario for a quiet week of canoeing, walking and quilting.

This is where things start to go wrong...

I opened the first package, followed the directions completely (even to the point of making flying geese in a way that I would not normally make them) and I discovered that the shop had not sent me enough fabric to complete the first block.

The tree

The tree and sky

The first house

Hearts (red in the illustration... blue fabric included)

That bottom row is supposed to be flying geese!!

If I had been at home, this would not have been a catastrophe - I would have been annoyed, but I would have added some of my own fabric to the mix, and it would have been fine... I cobbled something together to make the block the right size, grumbled and grumped and got on with Block 2.

Block 2's House

Block 2 was very cute. A big house, with friendship stars above it, and when I used my own method for making the friendship stars, I had enough fabric left over to make the flying geese. Off go the stripes and on go the flying geese and all is well with the world.

The friendship stars at the top extend over the next block as well.

The next morning I got up and the DH and I did whatever we were planning to do that day, and then I got on with Block 3.

4 patches

An 'apple' tree to go under the friendship stars!

A red house, and here is Block 3

And I think I looked ahead at the directions for assembly - and here's the top row of the quilt. Cute eh?

Top row of House Sampler

Nothing to be worried about now, we are just sailing along!
I did not finish the whole top while we were on holidays, but I did manage to get quite a bit more done on it, until I hit THE SNAG!!

More flying geese

The next house

Block 4 is done

Block 5 - I must have felt rushed. I did not take a photo of the process here.

I think they are supposed to be flowers...

Block 6 - Cute eh?

Here's the layout so far! (So far, so good!)

Star

Tree

Block 7

 And our holiday was over! We had a nice holiday, and I went home with these blocks all carefully folded up in my bag. Immediately when we were home in August 2012 I continued to work on the House Sampler. I'm sailing right along now, and everything is going well!

Block 8

The beginning of Block 9

Block 8 and 9. My design wall was a striped flannel sheet. What can I say, it worked!

And here is the snag! These wonky stars are WRONG!

 At this point, the snag struck. The shop that had not sent me enough fabric for the first block had also sent a copy of the pattern to me with an error in it. The error had been caught some years before (I contacted the designer) and a corrected pattern had been sent to all the shops. However, I had not gotten the corrected pattern, and I did not have enough fabric to make them again. (It did not occur to me to remake them with different fabric) so what I did was, I figured out how to add a thin strip of fabric to the bottom of the wonky stars to make them the correct size up and down to fit in the pattern. And I added a strip of blue to the left of the first star to make up the difference in the width.

I was MIGHTILY underwhelmed. I was so underwhelmed, in fact, that I was afraid to call the shop owner and give her a piece of my mind. I only have so many pieces left, and I felt I might be better off keeping hold of them. Boy, was I ANGRY!

The wonky stars - too narrow and too short... Grrrrr!

The wonky stars above the houses.

The small squares and the larger ones to finish the block

The wonky stars, modified to fit. Notice extra strip of blue to left of first star.

And so on September 4, 2012 I assembled the quilt top, minus the borders resulting in the following;

Assembled House sampler, minus the border

  And INTO THE NAUGHTY box it went.

In 2014, I got it back out. Hmmmm. Where is the pattern? I hunted high and low for the pattern. All of the left over fabric was in a little box, and the little box was in with the quilt top, so far... but no pattern.

I couldn't think of any way to blame the quilt shop for this, and the designer of the quilt seemed like a nice lady and I couldn't figure out how she could possibly have misplaced the pattern... I looked for a bag of patterns everywhere. Eventually, I took the piece of fabric that came with the last part of the pattern out of the box, measured it, did the math, figured out how much border I could cut out of it, and then I cut it and sewed it on.

It looked like this:

House Sampler Quilt Top complete

And I promptly put it back in the Naughty Box. Grrrr.

Fast forward to January 2016. Well, first, let's talk about October or November of 2015. I'm on facebook and I belong to a few facebook quilting groups. And one of them had a discussion about UFOs. And I modestly said, I thought I had 8 or 9 of them (whilst secretly thinking I had about 5 at the most) because I generally finished quilts once I started them (unlike counted cross stitch, knitting, crochetting, tatting, needlepoint... etc.) I didn't actually go and look at my UFOs, but I did know that this one was one of my 4 or 5 UFOs.

Back to January. In January I had a king sized quilt on my frame and it was taking me some time to quilt it. I free motion quilt with a mid-arm on a Grace Frame, and I love doing it, but a king sized Block of the Week (I still can't believe I did that!) takes some time. And I was thinking about what I would quilt next. And I was ALMOST finished being annoyed with this quilt.

So I went looking for it. I had 27 UFOs in two boxes and this was in the bottom box and in the bottom of the bottom box. When I finished the King Sized Quilt, I put this one on the frame... I like to take pictures of my work and I like to post those pictures in albums on facebook - I find the positive comments of my friends very motivating. And I generally keep all the information on one project IN the same album... I started quilting this, and taking photos of the quilting - and people were commenting on it. And my attention was arrested by the photograph that is the 4th one up on this blog. See the duotang? THAT's the pattern I was looking for! It wasn't in the original bags any more. I had taken all the pages, hole punched them and put them in a duotang...

So three days into the quilting process, I went downstairs to see if I could find the pattern. And the power promptly went out.

Do you get the feeling that this quilt was doomed?

Anyway. When the power went back on, I found the pattern. A couple of days later I finished quilting the House Sampler, and I put the binding on, and I love it now. The error in the wonky stars just gives it character. But it did spend a long time in the Naughty Box because of that!

The pattern - found after the fact

The blue wonky star, close up. See the narrow strip at the bottom?

Two more wonky stars - wonky and with character

Here's the finished quilt:

I am so pleased with it now. I wish I had known how much I was going to love the finished product when I was annoyed with it! :-)