March Free-Motion Quilting Challenge

Nothing like waiting to the last day to post my challenge pictures.  I actually finished these pieces much earlier in the month, but have been busy preparing for a local exhibit and working on my next large quilt.  I know, excuses, excuses, excuses.

I used this month's challenge to start something I have been thinking about for a while - a stitch library.  When I get ready to quilt either a traditional pieced quilt or a non-landscape quilt I am usually stuck for ideas on how to get started on the quilting.

I used Ann Fahl's tutorial to start creating little blocks of quilt designs.  I started with the ever present stippling design.  I get very bored with stippling so I started at a medium stipple and then went smaller and then smaller still.

The I used Ann's loops and hearts and stars.  More interesting and much faster to cover the same area of a quilt.

I then moved on to headbands, a Diane Gaudynski technique, and echo quilting.  I like the different texture this design creates and again much more interesting the stippling.

Next I used a grid format that I have used many times - but now have a sample to show.  This is quilted by marking lines horizontally and vertically 1" apart.  Then you start a one intersection and sew in a curve to the next intersection.  It goes very fast and if you have smooth curves - it looks impressive - like you are quilting circles!

Lastly I did a study of leaves for a quilt I just finished - which I will blog about separately in my next post.  I tried varies forms of leaves from oak to birch to a few made up ones.

In each sample I sewed a round button hole - I plan on using a loose-leaf ring to collect these samples so that the next time I need an idea how to quilt a project - I will have a library to look at.  I hope to create additional samples as I work on new projects.