Thursday, 5 June 2008

Row by Row Progress

Now that the blockage has cleared in the sewing room I am working on the Row by Row that the ladies at the quilt club collaborated on. Here is the last progress I made on it, laying it out with some joining rows. And this tells the story of how it was made.

I've now joined it all together and I've taken a very poor photo with my phone camera so that I can play with borders in EQ6. Here it is without borders and underneath there is also a picture of suggested borders taken from the quilting programme. What do you think? worth going ahead with or shall I play a bit more? the fabrics I've used in the borders are fabrics from the programme and are just suggestions of colours, I'll choose fabrics close to those colours from my stash.

Mm, the more I look at it the more I think that instead of the extra 1" dark strip at the top (necessary to bring the measurements to the right length for the strips of 3" squares) I'll use a similar strip of turquoise at the bottom to bring some of the luminous light it there and 'bring home' the turquoise in the borders.

Wednesday, 4 June 2008

Finishing a UFO

Do you remember a few weeks ago, I had some nice ladies come to visit my Swiftquilter? And I made a quick quilt to put on the frame so that we would have something to play with. Well, the quilt has sat on the frame ever since, with the quilting barely started but as long as the quilt was on the frame I couldn't use the sewing machine for anything else. And I wanted to use it as that Juki is *the best* at free motion quilting.

Yesterday, finally, I had the time, space and most especially, the will to finish quilting that quilt! I took the opportunity to pracise some McTavishing - which I haven't done before but I've got the book so I had a go and although its not exactly like hers the result is something I like. I alternated rows of my version of McTavishing with rows of vines and a couple of rows of feathers. Each row was different as I tried out different methods. I tried doing the vines and feathers with and without sewing a central stem first and I quilted the vines with and without sewing central veins on the vine leaves.