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