One of our last guild challenges of 2014 was a negative space challenge. I've been trying to work on my free motion quilting so I gladly took it on.
In the end, this is what I came up with. I wanted some bold and graphic and asymmetrical. And I wanted to practice using large and small scale quilting.
The fabric I used was all from Turkey. You can read about what it's like to fabric shop in Turkey in this post.
I stitched around the flower petals on the printed circles but left the solid ones alone. In between the circles I used a tight swirl and pearl pattern. I wanted some nice dense quilting to make the circles puff up and to contrast with the large scale design I had in mind for the other half of the quilt.
I did some marking for this just to make sure I had everything even. A dinner plate was the template for the center of the flower. And I cut one paper petal template and marked each petal and petal center. Some large scale stipple filled in any remaining empty space and I was done!
Since this was a practice piece for a guild challenge and didn't have an intended recipient, I just hung it up on my wall after the meeting. It fit just behind my sewing machine and made me happy to look at. But after it had lived there a couple of months, I looked at it one day and heard a little voice in my head tell me, "That's not your quilt, you know." Sure enough, there was a little girl I know who is fighting serious health problems. The quilt needed to go to her. So I made a label for it, which I hadn't done yet, named it 'Hope' and sent it off to its intended owner. Funny how you can make a quilt for someone and not even know it until later!
Your flower quilting is beautiful and what a nice gesture, so good that Hope is now where it's needed.
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness ~ I love this! I especially love how the big quilted flower complements the fabric flowers (or maybe, it's the other way around? hmmm)
ReplyDeleteI really need to practice my FMQing! When I started quilting, I was fairly confident, but then I had to get a new machine a few years ago, and the tension is fiddly, and I've just lost most of my confidence and skills :-( which is sad, because I really prefer FMQ over quilting with a walking foot (so sorry yours broke!)
Happy quilting ~ Tracy