Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Free Motion Quilt Challenge - October

This month our teacher is Teri Lucas.  She does some gorgeous free motion work and gives us some insight into how she does this..including how she holds the quilt.  Rather than hands placed on top to move the quilt, she prefers to grab hold of the quilt and move it around that way.  Interesting and I will give this a go next time I have a larger quilt surface.  Hard to grab hold of an 11" square! LOL  I drew out with pen and paper several blocks with various shapes and swirls and decided upon this layout.
October FMQ
I'm still trying to get the hang of even echo quilting.  Also having trouble with filler shapes such as what you see below the feathers on the left and in the right lower corner.  I keep getting lost and then lose my 'shape' rhythm.  Sigh...I'll never be a pro at this, but I'm better than I used to be!!!  I'm much better at tracing than I used to be, so this might be the way for me to go once I begin using these techniques on a more regular basis.  I'll have lots of quilt tops to practice on next year! LOL

Keep on Stitchin'!






4 comments:

  1. You may want to refer back to earlier posts for this challenge as to quilt sandwich recommendations. You can use a larger practice quilt sandwich (e.g. 18"x24" or 18"x18") and mark it if you want to quilt in a size of 11". Up to you, but a piece larger than 11" is definitely easier to quilt, plus it give you more area to practice with.

    Looking good.

    SewCalGal
    www.sewcalgal.blogspot.com

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  2. You are right, of course! Duh!! I started out with 11" sandwich pieces which will be cut down to 8" to make my sample quilt. Until now, I never even considered going larger! Thanks, SCG!!

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  3. Sue, your piece looks great. I really like the fill pattern you quilted just below your name, your pebble fill, and the Baptist Fan fill right next to your feathers. And your feathers are not as bad as you think they are -- you should see MINE!!! They also get better with practice. I actually noticed that my feathers look a lot better this month after I did the marked feather wreath design of last month's challenge. Maybe there is something to this "muscle memory" stuff after all! So I'm going to try practicing some marked feathers for awhile and see if that helps me do a better job quilting them freehand.

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