Just a lot of free motion quilting

I am rather enjoying the Midnight Quilt Show by Angela Walters on YouTube. If you haven't seen it, go to YouTube, search for it and subscribe. It is not meant to be a tutorial, but the pattern for the quilt that she makes while her children are asleep upstairs is available for free through Craftsy. As I write this, I think she has done 6 quilts and I have made two of them.

This is the Laurel Wreath Quilt - which I, for some unknown reason, have been calling the Laurel Leaf Quilt...

Yes, the photo is upside down!

My hubby kindly held the quilt top up so I could take a photo of it - and I did not realize that it was upside down until I got upstairs with the camera. Rather than interrupt him again, I simply turned the photo upside down.

And I also, without thinking, put it on the frame sideways. It was a matter of a few minutes to turn it around so that it was up and down, but I wonder why I have to do these kinds of things first, BEFORE I think... rather than think first and then do the thing correctly in the first place.

The background fabric, by the way, is a Kona Cotton solid, and the colour is Shale. And you need 3 yards of it, and 1 package of charm blocks. I WON a package of charm blocks at my quilt guild a couple of years ago. The miraculous thing is: I even FOUND them.

So I followed the directions for the appliqued bits. There is supposed to be a template with the pattern, but there wasn't, and I just cut them out without even drawing anything on there... So mine look sort of like hearts. Maybe my version of this should be called Sprinkled Hearts! :-) I like that.

I decided that I wanted to be able to see my quilting. There is a lot of negative space on this and I didn't want to cut it up into little squares (although, that would have been neat too!) So I picked a charcoal grey thread to quilt with, and away I went.

The Quilting is just started across the top

Stark!

My first thought was that that dark grey showed every little jiggle and wiggle. Ack! And then I remembered the old saying, "If the quilting isn't looking good, quilt MORE!" So I did. Lots more. I asked my hubby to come and have a look at the quilting so far. I was having some difficulty deciding whether I liked what I had done. So I asked him to rave about it. What he said was, "How come you didn't put MORE things on the background fabric - look at all that blank space you will have to quilt." Since that was the point of the quilt to me, I didn't find that very helpful. However, I wondered what would happen if I played with the lighting a bit.

I turned off the overhead light in the Quilt Studio, and used the sewing machine's light to light the quilting from the side to show off the texture. I felt better after I saw this, and I made it to the corner of the quilt...

Going around the first corner, overhead light on

Man, so stark. Off goes the overhead light again.

Once I turned off the overhead light so that I could not see the details, only the texture, I was okay. The next question on my mind was, what would I do on those little appliqued leaves or hearts or whatever they were. If I used that dark grey thread would they simply be overwhelmed? And what was I going to quilt on there, anyway.

I slept on those two questions. The next day when I got up, I decided I would switch to a lighter thread (not the light grey I have - I didn't want to have to go to extreme lengths to see what I was doing!) So I filled a couple of bobbins with taupe and tried a sort of feather on the open leaves and a small feathery thing on the small closed leaves. And pebbles in the background. Usually I draw my ideas on document protectors with dry erase markers, but this time I just went for it.

I'm not sure whether this was my best choice - because I didn't look at any other options. However, it is what it is.

I think I got things out of order here when I started down this long edge, but I wanted to see what it was going to look like. After I tried it this way, I decided that I needed to finish the quilting on the closed and open leaves, then the centre, then the feathered paisleys (or at least my take on those) around the inside, THEN the feathered paisleys around the outside of the quilt AND then the 5 hundred million little lines between to two layers of inside and outside feathers.

I started on the very middle bit first. And when I was working on it, I realized that the disadvantage with this is that there was no way to see where I was in relation to the top of the quilt. So I unrolled things enough to have a peek. And that is pretty scary too. How easy would it be to get wrinkles and puckers in there?? Holy moly!

Unrolled for a cautious peek!

Everything seemed to be going okay, so I rolled it back up and went back to that outside edge.

It didn't take me too long to decide that I needed to do the appliqued bits before they fell off. (None of them did come completely off, but I had two that were sort of hanging half on and half off...) My friend Irene asked me about those wrinkles... but I have the side tension clips off AND the quilt is partially unrolled.

A frenzy of pebbles and feathers ensued. Our dishwasher broke, and we bought a replacement. While waiting for the installer to come and do the deed, I did billions of circles, and rolled the quilt forwards and backwards a hundred thousand times to reach all the open and closed leaves and I, finally, that evening, finished with the off white thread. (Good thing, as I was also running out of the off white thread.)

Before I finished the whole oval of open and closed leaves, in fact, when I was slightly more than 3/4 of the way around the oval, I couldn't stand the suspense. Would I or would I not have the biggest pucker in the history of quilting, in that spot between where I had started the pebbles and headed clockwise around the oval, and where I would meet that spot again from the other end! I stopped and unrolled the darned thing to look. I'm not sure what I thought I would be able to do if there was a super big pucker, but I am pleased to report that everything was mercifully smooth, and I rolled it back up and carried on.

Next I had another look at that centre bit of feathered paisley. I wasn't sure it was centred or quite big enough... so I added a bit at the top. I didn't want to be doing too much rolling and unrolling while doing a hundred million little lines...

When I was happy with this, I went around the inside of the pebbles with another layer of feathered paisleys. (On the upside, they were sure getting easier!) Practice makes life easier (since it can't actually make things perfect.)

And when I had those done, I bit the bullet and did the hundred million little lines in the centre of the wreath. I would like to make a note here. I can not seem to do these little lines diagonally. They go all wiggly on me. So instead of trying that, I drew a diagonal line from the corner of the quilt towards the centre with a frixion pen - the kind that you iron out the line. I realize that if the quilt freezes (it is 'possible' in Nova Scotia in the winter time that this could happen...) the line will come back, and if it does I'll iron it again. :-) So my lines in the corners go horizontally - make a 90 degree turn and then go vertically.

By the time I took this photo of the centre, I had located my LED flashlight and was lighting the quilt with that. You can see the pebbles, the feathers, the feathered paisleys AND the hundred million little lines in this photo.

 Then I arrived back at the outside of the centre.

This is the left side of the quilt. The feathered paisleys on the inside - closest to the oval are going down or counterclockwise (widdershins!) and the ones on the outside are going up or clockwise. I tried to work them both at the same time at first. I would do a bit of the outside one and then a bit of the inside one, using the lines to connect the inside and the outside so that I didn't have to cut the thread.

But I soon realized that what I really needed to do, was to do all of the inside one, until I met the rest of it on the right hand side of the quilt. And then go around the outside from the right side, until I met up with the end that you can see on the photo above. I also decided that when I got around to the other side on the inside and then back to the bottom edge of the quilt on the outside, I didn't have to wait until everything was done to add the little lines.

So I began to finish things as I went along. This is the right hand side.

At the end of that evening, I was all ready to do the outside of the bottom. For some reason, I began to worry about wrinkles again. I pinned the bottom edge down very thoroughly.

The five hundred million little lines got easier with practice too. (Thank heavens.) There are so many, their very number masks any imperfections.

 

I began to find the little lines to be quite soothing... Until I had some bits that were far apart and I had to roll and unroll through some of those little lines.... however, the distances changed constantly so they soon moved close enough together again that I did not need to do that.

At this point I was getting excited about the prospect of getting the quilt off of the frame, and I did not take any more photos of the process.

Sarah ran over to inspect the quilt once I got it upstairs to take a photo of it. I think it passed the inspection.

So, untrimmed, and not bound (and not rectangular, as it turns out) here it is!

I flung it over the chair, to await a moment the next day to get a little time for the hand trimming. My hubby is getting quite good at hanging onto quilts of various sizes while I trim the edges off of them. Normally I use the border to give myself a hand measuring the edges. No border on this one... So I did my best to straighten it out using the lines on the ruler.  I did cut quite a bit off of the bottom edge (about 1 1/4 inches on one edge, to make a 90 degree angle there and to meet the other edge with a 90 degree angle.) It is fine now, and I could tell with it on the frame that it was not straight... and I allowed for that.

The pattern called for binding with the same colour as the background, but my friend Dawn thought I should use something prettier, so I found a batik in my stash that I liked. I LOVE binding, so that is not a chore.

Sarah decided to help with the binding!

Here is the finished quilt:

The finished size is 54 by 72 inches. My camera is not too happy with all of that grey background and finds it a bit hard to focus on the quilting.

And three close up shots:

All in all, I am really pleased with this quilt. When I took it in to show my 93 year old father this afternoon, he told me he loved it! And he asked me what it was for. That is a hard question. What is a quilt for... Hmmmm.

I told him I had made it because I liked the way it looked. I hadn't made it with any particular use in mind. I just wanted to make it because I like it. He was okay with that.

It was fun to do and I am tickled with the way it turned out.

Yours in quilting
Just Jane