Quilting Practice

You may remember back in April I organised a sewing bee day at which guild members created quilt tops out of the blocks I had got them to make. Two weeks after that at a Sit & Sew day I started turning the tops into quilts. I cut batting and backings for the 8 smallest quilt tops, although I only got 7 basted as I ran out of pins:

I also got backings cut for some of the larger quilts, but without pins they didn't progress beyond that. I'm planning to baste some of them this coming Saturday.

So for the last week or so I have been quilting the 7 small quilts I did get basted. It has been good practice. Some of the quilting designs came from a "Quilting Along" run by Angela Walters over the last couple of months, and others were from books or other workshops I've done.

Late today I took them outside to take photos in the sun to capture some of the quilting texture.

This one is pretty hard to look at:

So this is what it looks like on the back:

I quilted it all over with a pattern Angela Walters calls "Feather Meander". 

This one is Angela's "Swirl Meander":

This one has some ribbon candy, some wishbones, an egg and dart pattern, and some loopy things:

This one has some feather-like things, and some clamshells:

This one has Baptist fans:

I quite like the effect, but it took a bit of messing round with 2 different rulers to get the lines this close together.

I got a bit carried away with the next one. It is what some people might call "quilted to death":

I wanted to try the "Twisted Ginkgo" design, so I alternated that with some leaves and ribbon candy. Here's a close-up of just the twisted ginkgo part:

This is really not the ideal way to use a design like this. However it could make a nice background for appliqué or something in a special quilt.

Finally, a simple stipple, with some straight lines in the border:

Fortunately I don't have to bind any of these - other people have volunteered for that job.

I have about another nine tops to quilt, most much larger than these little ones. I think I will be repeating a few designs before I get to the end of them all.


Linked to Lizzie Lenard's Free Motion Mavericks here.