Two Tuesday Tips

I am popping in to give you a quilting tip and a piecing tip on this warm sunny Tuesday afternoon. I said I'd tell you how I quilted the pantograph design I'd seen a year or two ago on Instagram. There was no indication of what it was called, but Nancy of Grace and Peace Quilting had commented that it is 'Swells'. My Avanté is quite able to do pantographs; I'm just lazy to do the setting up and the figuring that goes with it to balance them so I just have never done one in all the years (since 2013) I've had my longarm. This design caught my eye for the wonderful all-over texture, so I used it on Drift.

Great texture, n'est-ce pas?

Follow Your Own Path (FYOP) QAL - Quilting Suggestions and HST Ideas

Welcome to an extra post for the FYOP QAL. I have been a naughty host and didn't do much of any prep for this week. I've been spending a fair bit of time outdoors in the yard. We went to a couple of greenhouses during the past week, and got a bunch of perennials and some annuals, and have been busy planting in the ground and pots. MacGyver has added another flowerbed, actually two, and it's all really starting to take shape. Yes, I will give some pics in a future post when things start to fill in a bit. Here is our crabapple in all her glory:

So the yard been the major consumer of my time lately, and resulted in no blog posts all week. I have been sewing a bit though!

TBT #23 Slip Into Autumn

Welcome to TBT for November! I have an absolutely favourite autumn quilt to write up today. From its name to its fabric (controlled scrappy, my fave) to its vibe and soft hand, I love it.

This is a Joanna Figueroa pattern from American Patchwork & Quilting in the naughts of 2000. Maybe 05 or 06? I finished it in September 2007 according to my label. I could comb through my collection to find the exact issue, but...renovations, sigh....magazines are packed up in some box somewhere.

Fallen Sky

If I were a James Bond aficionado, I guess I would have changed the name of my quilt to Skyfall. But I'm not, and he doesn't put me in mind of a piece of sky, which this quilt, along with the gemstone turquoise, both do. Funnily enough, when searching the gemstone for quilt name ideas, I came across a few references to a piece of the sky fallen to earth, but this one, "carved from an azure heaven and slipped to earth," I particularly love, as it's so eloquent.

This is the October challenge for us ambassadors for Island Batik. We were to make a quilt using a paper-piecing technique, either English paper-piecing or foundation paper-piecing. This one is made using the latter. All the fabrics (except the backing) were supplied by Island Batik. All of the threads except the purple was supplied by Aurifil, and the batting is Hobbs Batting, though I purchased it myself!

July Challenge Progress

Thought I'd pop in with a quick update here and a little quilting motif to show you too. The challenge for July is to make a quilt that has a secondary pattern. Totally up my alley! This is one of the things that drew me in to quilting in the first place. I'm using fabrics from three different groups, which is something I love about Island Batik fabrics, who supplied all the fabric, is that very thing, how different lines play well with each other. I got the blocks all done and laid them out on the kitchen floor...

and discovered my secondary pattern was Bella! But of course, she thinks she looks good with this quilt too.

Freefall Quilt Along Step 5

Woo hoo!  We are HERE!  Some of you are all, 'been there done that' because you've got your tops all sewn up, but here is the official final step to assemble the 25 blocks into a flimsy along with some quilting ideas.

Here is Freefall, in flimsy form.  Tish based her colouring page on this layout, which is also downloadable from my Craftsy store (affiliate link) for free.

I stand before you to say do not follow this layout to a 'T'.  Yup.  I've said this in several places here on the blog and in the PDFs to note where three of my leaves point together.  Not good because there are so many seams coming together there and it makes for a bit of a lump when you quilt over that area.

Here is the Windfall layout as a flimsy:

Complete with a Bella bum.

You can tilt your leaves any which way you like, even the H1-3 leaves can be in various places as long as the shadow leaf 45-degree lines are correct.

Moral of the story: don't be seamy, be free, and tilt away! 😁

As for assembly, you may want to try my 'Book It' method, which I almost always use for assembling quilt tops. Basically you sew the quilt blocks in columns, chaining each column together as you sew pairs together.  This quilt has an odd number grid, so you'd have two columns of 'books' and then one column of singles.  I learned this way back when I did colourwash quilts and I had many 2" blocks to keep in exact orientation.

Quilting

I don't know about you, but every since I bought my first quilt magazine, or quilt book, and came to the 'Quilting' part of a quilt pattern, I got supremely upset and disappointed to read the phrase, "Quilt as desired."  I get a little happier when I read these days, "Sandra quilted flowing lines with echoes, and swirls in the background.  She quilted straight lines across the shadow leaf, treating it as a separate entity from the background, and ignoring the leaves that fall on it. She also quilted some ghost leaves in the background areas."

I get really ecstatic when I get a drawn diagram or a photo that shows the quilting!

And when I get closeups to study.

This was after the shadow leaf had all the straight lines quilted. And okay full disclosure: I had no clue was not totally sure what I was going to do in the background!

Freefall was quilted on my Bernina.

I went with quite large swirls, 3/8-1/2" spacing, echoes and of course a ghost leaf

Windfall was quilted on Avril, my HandiQuilter Avanté.

Windfall got a border of ribbon candy around the shadow leaf after I did several straight-line echoes of the shadow leaf

Each leaf that was in the background got its own design.

Feathers, with contrasting thread

Leaf veins with matching thread

More leaf veins

And some got dot to dot work and elongated figure eight and continuous curves.

Threads

Freefall was done entirely with one colour of thread, probably my favourite one for blending in with multiple fabric colours, Aurifil 2600.

Like my Bernina, Avril likes pretty much any thread I've used on her, from cotton to polyester to rayon, various brands and weights.
For Windfall, I used Essential cotton, Isacord polyester, Floriani rayon and Aurifil cotton.

So there.  I hope I've made you ecstatic, and given you ideas. This quilt is quite a graphic design, so you could do straight lines across the entire top; alternatively, you could do wavy 'organic' lines across its top.  I wanted to define the shadow leaf from the background when I planned my quilting.  You can use whatever threads you and your machine prefer.

You have exactly one month, that is until June 15, what would have been my dad's 91st birthday, to get your quilts assembled into tops if you haven't already done so, and then quilted up and bound ready for the final parade and prizes!  To see a list of the prizes, go here and here and here.
There are 4 fabric prizes, a copy of the book Crafted Appliqué, and 8 pattern prizes!

Again, I cannot say it enough: THANK YOU!! 😘😘😘😘😘😘😍😍 for taking a chance on a blogger doing her first quilt along, to my sponsors for being so agreeable to offer prizes, and to my followers for quilting along with me...even though, sadly, I did not quilt along on a third version - YET - with you due to IRL circumstances.  It means so much that you've done this, and I hope you've had fun and that you are pleased with your quilts! I know I am blown away (ha, pun not originally intended) by the beautiful falling leaves quilts I've been seeing!  I cannot WAIT for the parade in a month!  If you fell behind, not to worry (ha, been there done that, am there NOW with my own damn QAL oops, haha) you have a full month to get it together for the parade and be eligible for prizes.

Linking up
Cooking Up Quilts

I'm Still Here

I don't have anything finished yet, but I thought I drop a few pics of what I've been up to:

I'm still plugging away at the handquilting on my runner.  I'm really, really enjoying it, despite my poor up-close eyesight these days (yep, wearing two pairs of glasses at the same time, sigh), and my sore pointer from the finger underneath the quilt that gets stabbed with each stitch.

I'm also planning the last of the charm square quilts (and I had a waking dream about the design for this last charm quilt, which excites me to no end!)  Unfortunately, the ivory fabric I want to use is in Kingsville, so this will get started here, and then finished back home.  It's a challenge as there are only 32 squares, 30 in the pack, and I had two leftover from the first one I did.

My self round robin you see peeking at the bottom of that pic is no further than when Dayna was here, but I have narrowed the appliqué pattern down to two ideas.  Am I procrastinating?  Uh, a little.  It's that "I hope I make the right decision, gee, I don't know, ew, I don't want to trace all those shapes onto Steam-a-Seam, will it be wrong to machine-appliqué if the centre is so beautifully hand-appliquéd?" stage.

I also have been really enjoying machine-quilting "Hidden in Plaid Sight".

Yesterday and today I did some more lessons online in Angela Walters' "Dot to Dot Quilting" class on Craftsy and I am just LOVING this class every bit as much as her Free Motion Feathers one.  Worth every cent.  I also have her Machine Quilting Negative Space class too, and can't wait to get started on that.

I must confess that I have spent more than the usual amount of time over the past couple of days, reverse-sewing, sigh.  Unpicking machine-quilted stitches is no picnic.  Neither is getting the window fixed in my sewing room so that it opens without having to be propped open with the can of QBS (who knew that can would have a dual purpose of 'holding'? LOL), only to discover, after I happily opened it, those 4-patches of charm squares mostly blown off!!!  One of the few times I hadn't taken a picture of the arrangement...BIG sigh.  I even unpicked hand-quilted stitches in the red zinger.  I'd quilted a couple of feet about 1/8" away from the seam, but decided it looked weird, so unpicked it all (easy, just heartbreaking to think of the lost time that it took to stitch) and re-quilted in the ditch.  I like it much better, so it was worth it.

Yesterday we spent a few hours kayaking in the Robinson Preserve, along the canals and into Perico Bay.  Just heavenly, so serene and calm.

I'm also reading a new author, Jo Nesbø.  It's The Redbreast, and is very good so far, intriguing, has me thinking on it as I sew.  Hope to have some finishes shortly!