A Finish and a New Beginning

Last week we took a break from the Free Motion Quilting Project with Leah Day, and I used that time to finish the music themed sampler quilt that I started in October. This is my very first full sized quilt, and back when I started quilting it I hadn't yet learned free motion. I thought that it would be quick and simple to just sew straight lines every 1.5" to keep it together:

Phew, that was a lot of lines! After working on this for weeks and getting much less done than I though possible, I ran out of thread and decided to put it aside for a while until I had developed better quilting skills. Last week I picked it up again and it's finally finished! My next post will be full of pictures and details about this quilt. One thing's for sure, this has made one cat very happy. (See that extended paw? Is that a claim of ownership?)

Even though this wasn't free motion quilting, it was the largest quilt I'd ever put through my small sewing machine and I gained lots of experience by moving it around and smoothing it out. Now that I've seen how much quicker free motion can be, I probably wouldn't do straight lines again on a full sized quilt.

I've also spent a fair amount of time in the last week sketching out a pattern for the next FMQ Project exercise, which will be a wholecloth quilt. Leah has been gracious enough to provide a really cute free pattern to practice, but I decided to urbanize it a little bit and I've been drafting my own urban wholecloth quilt design based on Leah's (hope you don't mind!) I'm actually very excited about my pattern.

Here they are side by side. My drawing isn't done yet, but you can see here that I'm using traffic cones in place of the hearts, and road barriers for the feathers.

It probably won't look quite as classy, but I think it's going to make a fun little wall hanging. Once I'm done drawing, I will transfer the design to bright orange fabric, probably by tracing over it while taped to the window on a sunny day. I can't wait to get started!