Sometimes you should give up

I haven't quite, but I'm fairly close. You wouldn't believe the pain and suffering I've gone through with the whole cloth and still not a stitch in sight nor even close to one.
The hot weather didn't help either, however I'm determined to do at least some stitching so this little quilt relieved the tension and got me back in the mood. the variegated thread is Aurifil again. Lovely stuff to work with.

Remember that top

I marked up on Wednesday? Well the outline of the feathers are quilted and I've started on the background. If you click on the photo you should be able to see the background is in a very pretty, very pale variegated thread. The feathers are in a deep purple and will be overquilted in red but I think I'll wash it first to remove all the inked registration and quilting lines.

Heide's quilt update

Yesterday I finished the circles and they took all day.
Today I've got 3/4s of the background done but have run into a little problem with the pale blue thread. It's too pale for the background and looks very nearly white, so I'll have to wait a few days for some darker to arrive. It's a holiday here so I can't order until tomorrow.
I'm having fun playing with the background stitching. I suppose I could start on the fireworks whilst waiting for the light turquoise thread.

Thread sample piece

This is for the lovely people at Quilt Direct, the background quilting is in the YLI Silk 100#, I love this thread and admit to self interest here, I want this thread to succeed and for them to make more colours in the 1000 yd mini cones (and sell them over here in the UK).

Quilters just wanna have fun

I've been in the sewing room again this afternoon and it's been such fun to play with the background. The only criteria I've given myself is to keep the scale somewhat similar but allowing myself to create little bubbles of fabric. So of course I couldn't resist a feather or two.And little swirly bits.
And another feather plus a many tentacled star fish sort of thing in the foreground.
And some spirals and waves and bits like the sand when the tide has gone out.
This morning I got some gardening done but hopefully I stopped before my back ached too much. (tonight will tell) . I dug down a fork's depth and I think I got 95% of the bindweed roots. I then turned it over and broke it up into a fine tilth and spread some seeds. I thought I'd take regular photos of this bed throughout the summer so you can see if it's worked or not. I planted another clematis against the shed. From the herb section in the supermarket I bought a pot of parsley. For me this is more successful than seeds, you get about 20 plants already started for about a £1, about the same price as a packet of seed. They look a little sad at the moment but in the past they have always revived so I hope they'll do the same this year. The grass is a bit dire but the lawn mower is under repair. I found out too late on Friday to collect it so there shall be yet another weeks growth before it gets attended to. It;s only about 10 months old so it has been done under warranty.

It's coming along

This is what it looks like when the fireworks are done but the threads have not been buried. The threads I'm using are acrylic on the front and Bottom Line in the bobbin. Both are very springy threads so burying them is not a joy (grin).
I've managed to finish all the fireworks (see link on the right to Patsy Thompson).

I pinned the backing on Thursday afternoon and yesterday morning. I started working on this at 8.30am yesterday morning and stopped at 9.30pm last night, so what you can see is 13 hours work with a short break for lunch.
With the backing on, I went round the feathers in an echo with the red thread and then again with the green (the green thread I'm using is Madeira Polyneon and the colour is Day Glo green, although it's brightness gets toned down against the bright grass green of the fabric). For those of you interested in such things the needle is an 80 Microtex . The top tension is set at ½. That's ½ between 1 and zero, not half way round the tension settings and the bobbin thread is quite tight. I've been having loads of fun doing all sorts of different backgrounds. This adds to the texture as well as making acres of background quilting less boring to do.
Click on the photo below to get a really good view of the quilting.

You can see how doing the feathers and the fireworks without the batting gives extra loft to the feathers. I shall go back and do one line of red back down the spines to secure the middle.


And I found this fun stripe for the backing.
I'm trying to decide between green and red for the binding.
I've also ordered the threads I need for another quilt I've entered and not yet started and once again my mouth opened before my brain engaged and I've promised a sample piece for a shop, so they can show how lovely it is using the silk threads.

One for today and a couple from a few days back

I admit to this mounting on canvas causing a few difficulties. I never did find my stapler, down to a combination of a full and totally disorganised garage and not being able to get down really low to root around the boxes on the bottom shelves. Steph bought her manual one round with her and did a very good job on this one.I lost my patience trying to find the staple gun and tried using glue. Not a good idea, it's the sort of glue which makes you high as a kite and flows right out of it's tube. And that's a very big problem for me. I don't know if it's because I was just born clumsy or whether I was stoned from the fumes but I managed to get glue both on the little quilt and my cutting board.

And this little effort is one of my feathers. The background is a variation of Diane Gaudynki's bananas and Irena Bluhm's infinity. As I've said before my DH calls it intestines. I can see why but I think it one of the most elegant backgrounds.

It's starting to come together nicely

I had these areas between what I've been calling train tracks for want of a better word. I tried the echo meandering thingy and bouncing curves of each side.
I also tried adding dome circles (just roughly to get an impression) and some small freehand feathers. These train tracks are about an inch apart.

I think the echo meandering looks the best so I'll go with that.
I also tried the curves on the grid going width ways. Nah, doesn't look as good. I am pleased with how it looks with the alternate diamonds with trapunto behind them.
I might even get to start on the real thing tomorrow, that's scary this quilt has been so long in the planning that I'm a little afraid of messing it up (gulp).

Another machine quilting background

This one does have a vague Japanese feel about it or water, or even Japanese water.

This was a quilt I made for Voldemort but in 1999. It's his millennium bug quilt. Remember that? I couldn't resist the keyboard fabric with little bugs crawling over it. And the bug fabric was cut by fussy cutting with templates as I had to get them all out of a short length of fabric. The keyboard is full scale so you can see this is done at quite a big scale, it would look good scaled up or down. I don't think it would look as good without contrasting thread.

Echo Machine background quilting

I try to fence off a little first otherwise it can get boring to look at and it means having to move the quilt around continuously .
So in this instance I'm going from the edge to where I want the first round of echoing to be.



To add a little more interest and to keep lots of curves, I'm adding a spiral here. You just spiral inwards leaving yourself enough space to spiral out again.

Simple isn't it?

Then just follow you previously stitched lines. Notice that the gap is not even. I wasted a lot of time getting my gaps totally even only to find it doesn't look great. It has no movement.

Sometimes if a line is getting too long or too straight, I'll stop and go back in the direction I came from.



Then on the next go round I have a little new curve to echo.






Here I've made the line to the right and behind the needle a little wavy. I'll probably exaggerate this wave with each successive round.

There one little area done.
It's also nice to break it up as it gives you small areas of achievement.

Making test sample

I couldn't leave it alone I had to see what it would look like with various backgrounds and with the blue backing. I used YLI Soft Touch in the needle and white Bottom Line in the bobbin.
The feather and the fist two rounds of echo quilting is white and the rest of the YLI was cream.
I quite like this colour, pity the fabric is white. When I took photos yesterday morning of it pinned up, it came up white, today the camera doesn't want to play nicely.

As I suspected the white stitching looks great but the stitching itself doesn't. I do want theis quilt to be as near to perfect as I can get it, so I think it will have to have a cream or white backing.
It does however encourage me to make a quilt with white stitching on blue on the front....
So many quilts so little time....

Voldemort, child of Voldemort and I are off to Art in Action today unless the weather is totally dire.