Starting the Year with a Finish

 It seems fitting that my first quilting post of the new year follows up on my last quilt post of 2021.  I am nearly finished with my Free Motion Quilting Academy Sampler!

In October I finally started adding motifs to the sampler and completed 5. Then life happened and I didn't spend much time quilting anything, though spent a lot of time thinking about it.

December 31st I spent time doodling and practicing and warming up on sandwiches and then added 4 more motifs.  The 1st was spent on a zoom call with my quilting bee and throughout the day, I added 14 more.  The last 7 were done on the second and then I turned to creating the binding before we headed out to see A Christmas Story (Broadway tour).  When I got home, I sewed on the binding, and somehow didn't see that I had twisted the final join until I trimmed it, so that was a lot of fun to fix, NOT.  Then started the relaxing process of handsewing the back. I plan to graduate from the course later this month. Just have to execute my whole cloth. Plenty of time she says...

The course taught us 30 motifs/variations on motifs and each of those appears in a square. Because I wanted some sense of balance - so not too many similar motifs sitting next to one another, I spent some time working on a quilting plan.

To create my plan, I drew each motif into a grid and then cut out my little quilt squares. I spent more time than I care to say moving the pieces around to find my perfect placement, then I glued them down. The cardstock stood nicely against plants and other piles of stuff on my desk to act as a reference point while I quilted.

I'm not sure why this course stuck/spoke to me. I've tried practice doodles in the past and worked to get to know my machine. After I'm not sure how many years of ownership, I finally feel comfortable quilting on my Sweet Sixteen. I'll share the finished quilt later this month once I finish the binding and take a better picture to submit.

I don't think it would be a quilt for me if I didn't have to spend time with tweezers pulling out bits of fabric from the inevitable sewing the backing into the quilt - thankfully BOTH times it happened this weekend, it was a small amount and, while tedious, easy to remove.  I finally finished using my dolphin batik yardage. I bought the end of the bolt when my son was in elementary school - and didn't realize how many yards there actually were. His mascot was the dolphins. Gus graduated from high school in 2019.  To make it work widthwise as I didn't have enough yardage to simply join two pieces side by side, I actually did a diagonal join for the backing. Tedious, and involved me taping fabric to the living room floor and crawling around a bit to make sure it was wide enough.

The course is Free Motion Quilting Academy - taught by Holly Anne Knight. String and Story She maintains a waiting list on her site so that you can be notified when registration for the next course opens. While you can work at your own speed through the course, you do start as a cohort. You do have access to course materials for life and to a great community of fellow quilters on Facebook. I first learned of the course from reviews by members of Quiltville Open Studio (Bonnie Hunter). I highly recommend the course.

I used a layer cake plus several random fabrics to create my sampler. The backing is the aforementioned dolphin batik and it is quilted using Aurifil in Dove Gray.

Below are the individual motifs. Lighting ended up a little funky and the question of why do you need to hold the camera flat over the block is answered with the weird shaped blocks in the pictures - in the quilt the really are mostly square.