Saturday, April 30, 2011

FMQ challenge continues

So far I have been able to do the FMQ challenge for the last 7 days. I seem to only grab a 15 –30 minutes time frames, but at least I am doing in each day. Thanks Wendy and Joanne for the challenge, it was just what I needed to jump start the FMQ again. Here is what I have been doing for the my day 6 and day 7.

For day 6 I finally figured out the swirl design for my daughter’s quilt. It was staring right at me in one of the fabrics in the quilt.

It’s feather design with swirly curls for the feathers. I wanted to quilt the red blocks in red and the only red thread that I had left was a spool of invisfil 100 wt. poly.

So I did one small area and it was a dream of a thread to work with, I melted into the fabric and showed very little wobble in the back tracking areas. The small area that is next to the swirl feather is about 1/5” wide by 1”  long. The invisfil thread is so fine that you can get very detail in the spacing and control of your movements. If you ever get a chance to work with this thread, do try you will be amazed by control you can have.

On day 7 I started the quilting the red blocks in DD quilt, going slow and that is OK. I mark each 3” block with a pilot frixion pen just enough to see. It might take me the next 7 days to do this quilt, at least I will have been working on it and not folded up in the corner. One thing that I noticed about this design is that every now and then the swirls form a heart shape, fitting for who the quilt is going to.

Cheryl M.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

One more on my plate!

Well I may have to be committed after May 6th, with all that I have going on now with teaching classes to guild projects and starting a couple of knitting projects, plus starting up doing my hand needlework again, I really don’t need another thing in my life. BUT I have decided to join in on an online free motion challenge that Joanne and Wendy are doing. It started on Friday April 22nd and goes to May 6th; the challenge is that you have to do some form of FMQ for 14 days straight. I think it will be more help to me than doing an overload to myself, for the simple fact that I will be trying to finish some of the projects that are lying around my sewing room. Finishing is always a good thing in my world. The projects are somewhat small so the idea is to get back to FMQ slowly and work up to doing maybe a couple of larger projects after the challenge is over. I have not done any FMQ this year and I only did a couple of things last year. So with that said I will go organize my projects and report back sometime tomorrow.