Wine Cozy Tiled with Bare Branches

A few weeks ago, Sam requested a wine bottle protector for his bicycle saddle bag. Our roads are pretty bumpy, and I want to ensure that no glass bottles shatter while he rides home. I got to apply my quilting skills to solving the problem, while at the same time practising this month's FMQ Challenge, which aims to give your stitching an overlapping tile effect.

I chose a panel of fabric with a pre-printed block on it, and stitched on some superimposed boxes, which I filled with Bare Branches, this week's featured FMQ Project design.

The busy print makes it pretty hard to make out the actual quilting, but hopefully you can see that I started with some very basic branching lines on the left, and increased their complexity until I got to something that actually looks like tree branches on the right. I used straight lines to divide the design into tiles. 

You can see those slightly better close up:

I'm not sure how well the tiles worked out. It's hard to get a feel for the overall design with so many flowers all over the place. I think I would have to give them another shot on solid coloured fabric in order to decide if I like them. I did, however, think the branches were pretty cool. 

In order to make the wine bottle protector, I cut a piece 16" by 13" out of my quilted floral panel, folded it in half and sewed up the bottom and sides, leaving some room at the top to add a drawstring. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to make.

Once I'd gotten the hang of Bare Branches, I grabbed another piece of fabric and tried to fill it with branches on a micro scale. I look forward to trying to thread-paint an actual tree this way at some point. 

I have a sewing machine question for the awesome Leah Day this week:
My machine only has a throat space of six inches. Do you think this is enough to quilt a queen sized project? Is there a rule of thumb to determine the maximum size a home sewing machine can accommodate?