Bits and Pieces

I'm in wrap-up and get started mode at the moment.  Last night, after an energizing guild meeting - the Durham Orange Quilt Guild, I came home inspired to at the very least finish my Fussy, Fiddly Threads Sampler. Sarah Ann Smith gave a fun and inspirational talk about her creative process.

 Step 1 - finish outlining the leaves and add some decorative quilting.

 This is very much a free-form project.  I broke the glitter thread two more times before figuring out that perhaps I needed to reset the tension on my machine. That allowed me to finally get those squiggles done.  I think my favorite thread on this project is the variegated.  It was fun to "paint" with it and see the leaves come to life. By the time I reached the last cluster, I decided to go even more free form and ignored some of the leaves that I originally sketched out.

So - even more energized at this point, I decided it was time to pick out the fabrics for the Aiming for Accuracy Quilt Along.  I started off with two color-ways in mind - a Red/Gold option or a Blue/White.  The recommendation is for 24 fat quarters - but that is as detailed as she gets.  My reds and golds are pretty evenly divided between regular and batik fabrics and I decided I didn't want to bother with mixing those in this project, so I pulled 21 different blues out of my stash.  The contrast (sashing) will be a white on white.  I will have to be careful of the placement of the heavily white & blue fabric (center front) so that it doesn't get lost against the sashing. I will probably add another navy and another dark blue.

I had completely forgotten about signing on for Christa's String of Pearls Quilt Along - and then found my set of charm packs again - so pulled together some coordinating fabrics for those as well. The striped backing is either a bed cover or table cloth that I found when I was helping clean my grandmother's house in February. That will be used as backing to make this into a picnic/beach appropriate quilt as it is a heavy fabric.

Finally, I decided I needed to play some with Mollie. I finished the vertical stitch in the ditch on the Sandy Breeze and still need to do some horizontal lines (I'm using water soluble thread so that I can practice and get a feel for how to maneuver the quilt without the stress of "perfection") and started to think about how I want to quilt these 15 inch blocks.  This little 5 inch stencil would get lost if I placed it onto each block, and I'm not sure I'm up to that many echo repeats to get it from 5 to 14 inches. I think instead that I will scatter these randomly around the center of the quilt.  I forgot to mark the quilt before basting it, so I may instead trace the design onto Golden Threads paper and unpin one section at a time to work on it.  Last night I proved to myself that I can follow the drawn line reasonably well, it will improve with practice, and my echo quilting isn't horrible - also room for improvement which I expect I'll see with practice.  This sample was done with the water soluble thread as I didn't want to unthread/rethread Mollie last night - so I will get much more mileage out of the sample sandwich.