Week in Review 2014 - 05/30

Tips, Techniques and Thoughts:

Free motion quilting sampler using Leah Day's
Spoonflower.com goddess fabric.

 My husband and I returned midweek from 19 days away, first visiting our family back east and then hiking the Kerry Way in Ireland. It is the longest we have been away from home, work and our comfortable routine in years. We may have returned, but I don't feel back yet. Instead I find myself needing to ease back versus my typical modus operandi of instant catch up. I'm easing back not just with my household duties, but with my studio commitments. Typically I order my to do list by priority and do the items with the most importance first. This week I have focused instead on gingerly moving forward by working on what is easy as a way to prove to myself I can still handle mixed media and free motion quilting. So far so good. I am getting braver and more energetic with each day back. Even with this attitude I managed to accomplish a little on my one studio day. Here is how it went.

1) Little Lake Butte des Morts in Fall (Due August 3)  - I chose not to tackle this project until I felt up to speed again.

a) Finish piecing the background
b) Start the quilting

Close up of the free motion quilting motif,
Zany Hearts.

2) Wild Apple 12" x 12" Opportunity - (Due August 15)  - I chose not to tackle this project until I felt up to speed again.

a) Create several more small works for the exhibition

3) Leah Day projects.

a) Baste the face, torso and arms to Express Your Love II. - On hold until the quilts with deadlines are completed.

My take on Serena Bridgeman's lesson:
Honoring Your Inner World.

b) Do Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting lesson. - Done.

I can't say enough about how much I enjoy trying out each new quilting motif that Leah Day comes up with. They are such a great/safe way to keep my free motion quilting skills up to snuff. Zany Hearts is perfect for practicing echo quilting and travel stitching.

4) LifeBook 2014 - Do the assignments. - One assignment from the three I missed is done. 

Serena Bridgeman focused the lesson on shadows and highlights. This is something I need to practice and play with again and again. The image is based on Serena's piece versus my own design. Still I am thrilled with the lotus flower. I really feel that I nailed light and shadow.

My rationale for easing back into the studio is jet lag. Hopefully, this will pass soon and I can get back to my pre vacation pace. Whatever my pace here is the work that awaits me:

1) Little Lake Butte des Morts in Fall (Due August 3) 

a) Finish piecing the background
b) Start the quilting

2) Wild Apple 12" x 12" Opportunity - (Due August 15)

a) Create several more small works for the exhibition

3) Leah Day projects.

a) Baste the face, torso and arms to Express Your Love II. - On hold until the quilts with deadlines are completed.

b) Do Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting lesson.

4) LifeBook 2014 - Do the assignments.


I am now linking up to two blogs on Friday's. The first is Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting Project and the second is Nina Marie's Off the Wall Fridays.

Quilting Along with Leah Day - Week 45

Front Side of Week 44 & 45 Practice Piece

December 21, 2012 has come and gone and the world did not to come to end. Not that I was worried. However, I have been struggling with the idea that Week 45 of Quilt Along with Leah Day would be the last assignment. I have truly enjoyed the process of tackling each new assignment. What would I do next to keep the momentum going? It seems that Leah has a whole new series of assignments she has been working on for 2013. Guess what I will be doing?

Back Side of Week 44 & 45 Practice Piece

When I am not blogging about my experience of creating under Leah's tutelage, I plan to share my personal work as well as Tricks and Tips of the Trade. Here is my first tip - there is no right way to do what needs doing in quilting. What is important is to try various ways and understanding what they are and are not good for. Which way to press a seam is a perfect example. When I started quilting, back in the Jurassic era, the hard and fast rule was to press the seam towards the darker fabric. Why? There were three reasons. One, the dark fabric, if pressed towards the light fabric might shadow through. Two, batting tended beard and therefore by covering the seam by pressing fabric over it, batting threads wouldn't sneak out through the seam to the front of the quilt. Three, most quilts were hand quilted. The quilting motif could be designed so that it never had to go through more than three layers (top, batting and backing) versus four layers (top, seam allowance, batting and backing.) My preference today is to press my seams open. Why? The seam allowance doesn't shadow through. The quilt is flatter. I choose a batting that doesn't beard. Finally, I no longer hand quilt. My machine can handle going over seam allowances.

Detail showing a tweaked "Heart Confetti"
quilting pattern. 

What that tip is really saying is that you are in charge of your design and your technique. There is so much praise I could heap on Leah, but I will share one thing here that I appreciate about her. Leah encourages experimentation. She does not insist that things be done her way. Of course her way has come from experimenting and learning what works best for her. In this week's assignment, "Heart Confetti" I diverged from Leah, once again. What I liked about the design was the hearts, the echoing and the pivoting. I'm still not sold on overlapping designs. I did overlap a few hearts in the beginning, but quickly swapped out the overlaps for tripling and even quadrupling my echoes instead. I actually find it less confusing to pivot and echo a design than to overlap. Of course my goal wasn't to cover a big area quickly with an overall pattern. I just want to quilt hearts in the star section of my quilt.

A back side detail of my version of "Heart Confetti."

Once I completed "Heart Confetti", or perhaps I should rename it "Throbbing Hearts", I tried out my own pattern, "Starry Night" in the border. It is done by creating a short curvy line, then a five pointed star, followed by another short curvy line which precedes to spiral first in and then back out again (much easier than travel stitching) then repeat.

"Starry Night" seen from the front.

"Starry Night" as it appears on the back.

I am so grateful that our journey with Leah is not coming to a halt, but will continue on into 2013. I hope you will join me in a year filled with the joy of creating.

Quilting Along With Leah Day - Week 43

Front Side of "Scribble"

This week's free motion quilting design was named Cat Hair Ball or Scribble. The way it turned out when I let it flow naturally was reminiscent of a pretzel, just without the cross. This is definitely a quick, easy and soothing pattern. Leah recommends it for sashings. I tried it as an all over design. My recommendation would to be to use it for a young child's blanky.

In Leah's instructions for executing Scribble she mentions that the "bird's nest" or what I think of as eyelashes that can be seen on occasion with this pattern, on the back of the quilt is NOT a tension issue but an issue of how it is easy to be change the speed of your hands as you swoop around a curve, thereby getting out of synch with the speed of the needle, controlled by your foot on the peddle. Although I rarely get an out and out bird's nest on the back of my quilt any more, I do have a tendency to get eyelashes. So, I challenged myself to reduce them when practicing Scribble. They are there, but in general the eyelashes are less frequent and most are mere stubbles.

Backside of "Scribble"
Note I wrapped it with echo quilting

Another goal I gave myself with this assignment was to keep the quilt fairly open or at a midscale, versus my tendency to go for small scale and even micro scale quilting. This keeps the quilt more supple. However, I find it trickier to avoid the eyelashes and maintain an even scale in mid to large scale quilting versus small scale quilting.

Detail of the backside of "Scribble"
In some areas the eyelashes are obvious. In other areas
you have to look closely to see hints of them.

Backside of the "Pod" practice piece.
An excellent way to compare the designs
from the last three assignments.

Quilting Along with Leah Day - Week 42

Front Side of Tangled Lights

I really should go back and check Leah's video before I launch into doing my assignment.  I tend to remember the gist but not the details. On the plus side I often end up with a cousin of Leah's designs, giving me double the patterns to play with in the future.

Back Side of Tangled Lights

The plan this week was to rapidly quilt sashing by "stringing" spirals one after the other. I can't recall the last time I pieced a top that included sashing. This put me in a dilemma. Should I piece a new practice top with sashing or tweak the design to be a filler pattern. My time was very limited this week since I was on the road. I opted to tweak the pattern and title the new design Tangled Lights. 

Detail of Tangled Lights

In order to execute the filler pattern I started with a wobbly spiral baseline, working from the outside towards the center of the space I wished to fill. Once I reached the center I added the spiral ornaments/lights, working my way out along the wobbly baseline. I left gaps between the ornaments because that is what I thought the design called for. Oops! However, those gaps allowed me to stagger the ornaments, which left room for the next concentric row of an ornaments out. Finally, since I added Tangled Lights to my Wrapped Gifts practice piece, I wrapped my ornaments with some echo quilting.

Quilting Along with Leah Day - Week 41

Front Side of Wrapped Gifts aka
Invasion of the Pods.
The yet to be quilted section is on reserve
for a future assignment.

"Invasion of the Pods" is the catchy title that Leah Day gave to this week's assignment. The mission, should I choose to accept it, is to quickly knock off  the quilting necessary to turn a WIP or UFO into a gift for some lucky person this holiday a season. I might have chosen "Gift Wrapped with Love" as the title. In fact that is just what this free form pattern has you do. First you create the "gift" and then you wrap it with love by surrounding the gift pattern with echo quilting. You can give the same gift multiple times on a quilt or custom select a different gift for each section.

Detail of Snake Paisley including the gift wrapping echo.

My first step was to create a practice quilt. I wanted something large enough to practice on and I like to have a few seams, just for the challenge of crossing over them. I also like to select multiple fabrics, since most quilts are not have the same hue and with a varied value. I went to my stash and chose five compatible fabrics from my violet/fuchsia stack. I cut each of the five into 12.5" wide sections by the height of the fabric. Sometimes this was 14" and at other times it was closer to 20". I alternated the violets with the fuchsias, seaming them along the 12.5" side until I had a length of fabric approximately 90" long. I cut this in thirds and this time seamed the resulting three segments along the 30" length. Viola! Instant quilt.  I think this method would be a great way to use fat quarter packets. One of the advantages of various lengths of fabric is that the "blocks" are randomly staggered.

Detail of Flowing Leaves

Now it was time to select the "gifts" or free motion quilting pattern that would be at the center of each segment. I turned where I often do for inspiration, to Leah Day's 365 Quilting Patterns and looked through her pivoting patterns. I thought I should wrap four gifts in order to both practice the wrapping and how to move from one quadrant or section of the quilt to next. I choose Snake Paisley, Flowing Leaves (one of my all time favorites that I have used in numerous quilts) Pebbled Paisley and Dandelion Puff.The first gift I created was Snake Paisley. I had no problem with free motion quilting the design. Nor did I have an issue with echoing the outer perimeter of the clump of paisleys. However, I did struggle with what to do about echoing the sections near the outer corner and along the edge of the quilt, because echoes assume an even border, but this was substantially wider. I "faked" it. If I were to use this method on an actual quilt, I would either want to make sure my paisleys did a better job filling a segment evenly or work out a better method of echoing large, open sections.

This is where the four gifts come together.

An even closer view of the juncture of the four gifts.

The rest of the gifts/segments basically went without a hitch. So, perhaps I learned sufficiently from the first segment to adapt the final three. As for using this method of quilting to rapidly quilt a UFO or WIP, I think not. Other than stippling, which I could have chosen, any free motion quilting pattern takes time and so does echoing to do well. However, if you have time, this could be a lot of fun, especially if you theme the various gifts to go along with the quilt's theme - say leaves and flowers for a garden path quilt.

Backside of Wrapped Gifts