Wednesday, October 12, 2011

W.I.P Wednesday (the second)

WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced 

Not much quilting got done this week, but I'm ready to get sewing a hopefully have more to show you next week! At the moment my landlord has some roofers working on our house, and the noise isn't exactly conducive to relaxing craft time; neither is Starbucks, but at least I can upload some pretty pictures!

New Projects
Just the one:
I put together this log cabin block from some of my favorite sheets, although I'm not sure if I'm ready for a whole quilt of these things. It just seems a little fussy. I might try making a few more blocks using the same floral fabrics but different solids alternating, so that there are squares of different color across the whole thing. I think I've got to stare at it for a while longer first though.

Ongoing Projects
I'm slowly quilting Giant Block Quilt #2.
After the fun of the first one, I sat down and sketched a bunch of 4x4 quilt blocks that would translate well into one large quilt. Then I picked my favorites and matched them to some vintage sheets and cut out squares and triangles. #2 here is the blue one, and while I love the fabrics, I realized while sewing them up that some are extremely thin. I didn't want to make a quilt that would wear out and come about quickly, but I didn't want to start over either. I decided that the solution was to quilt as densely as possible in the weak areas. For my lack of experience with different FMQ styles, this means a lot of pebbling, which is fun, but time- and thread-consuming. I'm about halfway through, and decided yesterday that I needed to throw in some straight line quilting, just for contrast. What I got was this:
pucker up!
This is why my walking foot stresses me out so much: the puckers! The darn thing just doesn't feed evenly. I had originally planned to quilt the entire triangle with straight lines, but the puckers just got so bad in that top left corner there -
- that I had to come up with plan B. I used some painter's tape to tape back the bunch stuff, and just quilted the smaller triangle in the center of the tape. There are four of these triangles total, and I'm in the process of repinning them to make things smoother.
I realize that part of my problem is because the pebble-style quilting adjacent to this block is distorting the edges, but that's not the only reason. My walking foot has always done this, and it's exasperating, especially since I really love the look of straight line quilting. So I'm wondering if maybe the solution here is basting spray? I haven't tried it before, because I don't really like the idea of spraying stuff on my quilts, and it seems like something I could easily mess up, but I also don't want to give up on straight line quilting yet! So anyway, I plan on acquiring some and giving it a shot, perhaps with one of my...

Completed Tops Awaiting Quilting
Parisville, still. But! This weekend we are visiting my mom and here lovely, large wood floors. I'm almost tempted to see if I can put together a second large, though necessarily much simpler quilt top just to take advantage of the opportunity!
Prince Charming's Wedding Ring and the Giant Tree Quilt are still hanging out, getting a bit of handquilting here are there. Those two will be a while yet. I did get some cute flowers under the tree:
I also did a squirrel, but story of my life, forgot to take a picture. Maybe next week.

No Progress
Drunkard's Path Quilt Along - fabric is in the mail though! Fabric requirements and basic instructions have been posted, and I'm really excited to get started!

1 comment:

  1. What a bummer about the puckering with your walking foot. I was hoping someone would have had suggestions, because I'm new to machine quilting and need to learn about these things, too. What kind of batting is it?

    ReplyDelete

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