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! 🙂
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.
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.
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