Oh my goodness, where has the month gone?? I know February is a tiny month, but it just seems like it was January. That's okay, I'll ring in March with a little Throwback Thursday fun and my dear friend, Sandra at mmm!quilts.
For today, I chose my version of Melissa Corry's All Framed Up baby quilt for Moda Bake Shop. I used precuts and yardage of Moda's Blue Berry Crumb Cake line. To this day when I see this fabric I still want a blueberry muffin. I'm drooling now.
I made this quilt simply because I wanted to make something and I loved the fabrics and pattern. It currently lives (all finished) folded on a shelf in my back room. I guess it ended up in the back room kind of forgotten because I didn't think it was good enough to give away. This quilt is part of my learning to free motion journey.
These two pictures are of a different quilt, earlier than All Framed Up, but I wanted to show the stitching on it. I attempted to meander/stipple in the white fabric. My stitches were so microscopic and close together you couldn't pick them out if you wanted. My movements where kind of jerky and didn't flow with ease. I think that's normal for most people starting out. Even though these stitches are far from perfect, it still created wonderful texture and my (at the time) seven year old daughter, didn't care. She loved it.
I show you those stitches, so that we can talk about these stitches. I again tried stippling all over All Framed Up. I guess I really had not been brave enough to try other motifs at this point and I also find myself wondering why I never quilted with my walking foot?
My scale is of course bigger than the previous quilt, but with the challenge of quilting on a larger scale, my stitches became bigger. Some are much bigger than I would like. My movement in the shapes are much better, but still jerky in places. I will note that I did continue to practice (sporadically) between these two quilts, meaning practice does make you better.
If you look to the right of my hand, you may notice a thick goop or thread and I just noticed a spot where it looks like the thread just stops. This is in the center of the quilt (of course). I remember having a HUGE bird's next on the back. I probably cried for a little bit, but eventually picked it out the best I could. I am assuming that was me trying to back track or travel. The random stopped stitch, not sure about that one.
But lets fast forward to now.
This is the back of a quilt I have recently finished. My stippling is much more curvy and flowy. It's not perfect because it never will be, I'm human (and I own cats that like to jump on said quilt while I'm quilting). I show you all this, because I'm going to keep harping nagging encouraging you to free motion quilt. I'm going to guess 90% of people who start out free motioning end up feeling discouraged and depressed that their stitches don't measure up to someone else's. STOP. I look at it this way, maybe the universe says you have to stitch so many bad stitches before you stitch good ones. Again I think it's called practice, believe me I avoided it too. So don't be afraid to quilt, it puts you one stitch closer to where you want to be. Ok, it's getting windy up here on top of my soap box, I'll come back down.
Do you have a quilt from your quilty past you'd like to share? Take some pictures, write a post and hop over to mmm!quilts and tell us all about it.
Today I'm linking up with Throwback Thursday.
