Saturday, October 17, 2015

And Another Start

 Using another toy, my Accuquilt Go I cut out flying geese blocks.

These are made with African fabrics and batiks. The pattern is called the Dutchman's Puzzle, Spinning Windmill.

The windmill is the in center, the middle fabric is the same.

Another Finish

Every January my friend Carole and I go to the Arizona Quilt and Craft show at the fair grounds. A couple years ago Carole and I met Loralie Harris. She designs fabric and machine embroidery designs. I purchased some designs, went home stitched them out and promptly put them aside. My original thought was to make a quilt in red, black and white. As you can see that plan didn't work out. 



Most of the fabrics were also designed by Loralie. After some thought I decided to quilt around the embroidery. It's only the second time I have done so - I think it would have been OK to stitch over the embroidery because it is a single color embroidery and the designs aren't dense. But it did give me some practice with semi-custom quilting. 



T-Shirt Quilt

This is only the second t-shirt quilt I have made. It might be my last. I had a few struggles with it. I used a special stabilizer; it was a grid on point. In theory it is a good idea, but it is really hard to work with. You need a large table and a lot of space. You lay out the quilt on the back side of the stabilizer but the lines of the grid are hard to see on that side. I think it would have been better to have the lines on the back side because when you sew it together you are using a standard stitch of 1/4 to 3/4 of an inch so if the quilt has been laid out correctly the blocks will line up.

For those of you who have questioned the thickness of quilts, here is an example of a quilt using a thick polyester batting. The batting is an inch thick. It was difficult to quilt because of the thickness. Thick batting is best for hand quilting. The quilt is heavy and polyester batting holds the heat so this quilt will be very warm this winter. It's new home is in Tennessee so it will probably come in handy.