The Garden Quilt
First I have to say – I’m changing the name of the Walk Through the Garden quilt. The name is too long and it doesn’t feel right, you know? I can’t come up with anything that fits so I’m just going to call it The Garden. Those prints remind me of a garden so that’s what I’m going with.
So, staying with the whole garden theme, I thought it would be fun to quilt this with a flower design. Something simple though, cause I’m a newbie at this. I’ve seen this loopy flower design on the internet so I spent some time drawing it. If you are new to free motion quilting, just let me say that practicing by drawing your design really does help. Give it a try – you’ll be glad you did.
After practicing on paper, I moved on to a practice piece. The top looked pretty good, but the tension on the back wasn’t good. So I spent a good bit of time practicing the speed of my foot pedal and my hands and making some tiny adjustments on my tension dial. Working with all those loops is a bit trickier than the meandering loops I did on the Accidental Dresden. I finally found the sweet spot. Yay! But I’m having a little trouble keeping it. If you see my sweet spot running around, please send it home! 🙂
Loopy Flowers on top of quilt.
So now I’ve started on The Garden quilt. I really like this loopy flower design. It works up fast and each flower is individual, with it’s own start and stop point. I wasn’t sure I would like dealing with all those start/stop threads but it’s not as big a pain as I had anticipated. You could also make this a meandering, continuous pattern pretty easily and I may do that the next time I do the loopy flowers design.
I’m using a cream thread for the top and a celery green in the bobbin to match the back. I’m not super crazy about the two color look, simply because the green will sometimes bleed through to the top. I hope that that fixes itself when I wash it but the more I work on the quilt the less confident I am that will happen. Because of this, I’m not feeling warm and fuzzy about using two colors of thread.
The back. The thread matches the backing but sometimes shows on the top.
I have the lower right quadrant of the quilt quilted and it took me about 2-1/2 hours. I hope to finish the quilting this week.
The top. The flowers just blend in.
You can read more about this quilt:
New Project: Walk Through the Garden
Update – Walk Through the Garden
That’s my update for this week. I hope you have a great week! Linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced.
Your flowers are looking great! I usually use two different threads in top and bottom, but it really depends on the colours. I probably wouldn’t use a white and a black or red or something bright though. I think if the colours are similarly toned it’s okay (I think of celery as a light green which I think should be fine with cream!). Funny how these little things bother us though 🙂
I use two colors of thread all the time, Beth, and I am always worried when I do the quilting but happy after the first wash. I think that the colors and thread tension should work itself out in the magic of the wash for you, too. Great flowers to go in your Garden. 🙂
What a lovely quilt! Your fabric selection for the bricks is very elegant and eye-catching, and from those flowers you’d never know you are new to FMQ – they look great. And, I love the look of pick-up and put down FMQ, I just hate clipping the threads :-p