Quilting Along With Leah Day - Week 21

Wonky Block Quilt
40" H x 36" W

My Wonky Block Quilt is done! Well at least the piecing and quilting aspect. I would need to trim and bind it in order to truly finish it. I use Photoshop to clean up my images before posting them on the blog.

The goal of Week 21 was to use a zentangle doodle to divide the quilt into random sections and then fill those random sections with the five free motion quilting patterns we have been practicing. 

Back Side of Wonky Block Quilt

I began by marking the back side of the quilt with zentangle loops. It is MUCH easier to see marks on a solid fabric than it is to see them on patterned fabric, particularly patterns that incorporate a wide range of values and hues. Since I use the same thread in my bobbin as I do in my spool, I could start by quilting from the back side, too! If this were to be a show piece versus a lovey quilt, I would not have had the courage to free motion quilt the doodle and its echo back side up. I opted to free motion along the line of the doodle for practice. I find long lines of quilting the toughest to "hide" the wobbles and detours that come from stopping, starting and readjusting my hands on the quilt sandwich.

Detail Showing Several of the Quilting Patterns
as well as a Section of the Echoed Zen Tangle Doodle

Once the doodle was stitched I flipped the quilt over to the front side. The stitched doodle anchored the sandwich and it "marked" the sections where the stippling, sharp stippling, circuit board, loops and what I think of as flame patterns were to go. I opted to start and end my quilting section by section instead of travel stitching along the doodle. Perhaps with a little more planning I could have been sure to start and stop at junctures like the one in the detail above, but since it is so easy to bury threads with a cheater needle it just didn't seem worth it.

Detail Showing Several of the Quilting Patterns
as Seen on the Back Side

One of the areas where I can use extra practice with my free motion quilting is with larger than small scale. It was tempting to really go to town with micro stippling within the "loops," but I held myself back and did mid scales patterns over the whole quilt. Although my circuit board may not have precision crisp corners and straight lines it is less round than when I was first introduced to it and I rarely get hesitation build up or loopy thread. This practice is really paying off!

Quilting Along with Leah Day - Week 20

I'm still playing catch-up from our vacation in the Canadian Rockies. We ended the trip at the Fairmont Hotel on Lake Louise. This is an image taken by my husband from our room early in the morning before breezes and canoes disturbed the lake. Note the near perfect symmetry of the landscape.

Lake Louise

Week 20's assignment from Leah had her followers playing with potential layouts and eventually selecting one using the wonky blocks from the previous week. This proved to be much harder than I anticipated. My wonky blocks just didn't like to play well together. Some of it had to do with the broad spectrum of values in the fabrics going from fairly light to very dark. However, the fact that lines created by the piecing of the blocks were close but off had an unsettling, jarring effect. Nevertheless I preserved and discovered that symmetry helped. I also added an extra strip on two sides of the quilt (top and bottom of the horizontal quilt) in order to "finish" the border.

Wonky Top Hung Horizontally

Wonky Top Hung Vertically

I'd love your feedback. Which do you think works best, the horizontal or vertical orientation?