The Wrestling Match Begins

I have one more piece left to quilt, and it’s a doozy quilting-wise. I am enamored of circles and can get carried away when I put them on quilts, not remembering that I will have to quilt them. Of course, that’s not a problem if I take the easy path of straight line quilting.

For “Happy Accidents” I decided to feature circles in the quilting, so easy isn’t likely. It measures 29 by 45 inches,which sounds quite doable until you shove the quilt around 360 degrees a few times. And I plan to emphasize some curves with heavy threads.

Here’s the top after some refinements with Neocolor II pastels.

Color isn’t true.

The copy is pink because my printer’s cyan ink jets were clogged.

Another issue I face is the difficulty of marking the quilting pattern with eraseable markers or pens. Some of the fabric won’t take marks well and the paper resists everything. I may need to make quilting templates with freezer paper and iron them on.

I’ve chosen several threads in different weights so I will be changing colors frequently.

That leads to the last issue (I hope.) I have matched my quilting thread so well I can’t see the previous stitching in the paper areas, where I need to eyeball the new lines from the previous ones, as I can’t mark the paper. Whee!

I’m linking to Off The Wall Fridays.

A Quilting I Will Go

The next piece in my quilting queue is Damask and Denim, a large work that features much recycled material. It’s pin basted and awaits a quilting design decision. Because you’ve helped me in the past, I’d like your opinions of the rough designs I’ve developed. Thanks in advance.

First, the quilt top itself.

Option 1 surrounds zigzags with straight horizontal and vertical lines.

Option 2 uses all zigzag lines.

Option 3 combines the above two with straight lines only on the top and bottom.

In all versions the diamond centers would be free motion quilted with a diamond spiral. Thread color is open at this point. I’m considering either blue or very pale yellow thread.

Any thoughts? Ideas?

How Should I Quilt My Eggs?

One of the quilting projects draped over my second floor balcony has me stumped for a quilting design.  It’s for a small group 1:3 ratio challenge.  I had little trouble designing the piece, but I’m dithering about how to quilt it.

Originally I thought about concentric circles or ovals radiating from each egg that would overlap each other. Then, I considered a spiky design with lots of lines quilted at angles to suggest nests for the eggs.

Here’s the design I developed using Paint software.  I like this effect, but now have to figure out how to quilt the eggs themselves. One possibility would be to do more lines inside the eggs, bouncing off the edges. I drew them in very lightly below.  I’d use thread color that corresponded to the dominant color in each egg.

Help! Your thoughts and ideas are welcome.