Beautiful quilt top, not so beautiful quilting!
A dear friend "loaned" me this top to practice on. Doodling on yards and yards of muslin gets expensive and I'm serious, ANYTHING done on muslin just seems to look gorgeous! I've had this for a few months now and it finally came up to the top of the stack. Planning this out, I knew using thread that matched each block would be ideal or a variegated that stood out from each block would have worked too. This would also mean that I needed to find a backing fabric in my stash that could handle lots of starts and stops plus brown, green and blue thread. I could not believe I had all 3 colors in So Fine and even had enough backing fabric in a perfect fabric for the back.
I love the top and wanted to do something that emphasized the stacked look of the blocks. Feathers would have looked great but I wanted to do something different. I found a pattern I thought would work well in Sue Patton's book QUILTING Possibilities...Freehand Filler Patterns. I copied her design, cut and rotated and taped it back up to create what I thought would be perfect for this quilt top. My execution fell short of my expectations though.... I prefer traditional patterns, symetrical and balanced and my work does not represent this. My center designs in particular bother me but I'm not ripping it out! Washing will soften the look a little and help hide some of the flaws (I'm hoping!). The main block I am fairly happy with but the block design for the green blocks just did not work. I did not like the fat design of the original pattern and went with a skinny leaf making the block too busy compared to the other design. Also the oval design just really does not come through after stitching, maybe because the interior of the design is too busy? It is what it is.... Thanks for looking!
I love the top and wanted to do something that emphasized the stacked look of the blocks. Feathers would have looked great but I wanted to do something different. I found a pattern I thought would work well in Sue Patton's book QUILTING Possibilities...Freehand Filler Patterns. I copied her design, cut and rotated and taped it back up to create what I thought would be perfect for this quilt top. My execution fell short of my expectations though.... I prefer traditional patterns, symetrical and balanced and my work does not represent this. My center designs in particular bother me but I'm not ripping it out! Washing will soften the look a little and help hide some of the flaws (I'm hoping!). The main block I am fairly happy with but the block design for the green blocks just did not work. I did not like the fat design of the original pattern and went with a skinny leaf making the block too busy compared to the other design. Also the oval design just really does not come through after stitching, maybe because the interior of the design is too busy? It is what it is.... Thanks for looking!
I love this quilt top. You can display from any side and the "card trick" type pattern looks so different!
Do you see the 3 sets of ovals in the green blocks??
This is the mock up of the design I was trying to quilt. See the nice oval lines in the alternate blocks?
The perfect backing. Brown, Green and Blue and so busy that messy stops/starts never show!
Many thanks to my dear friend for allowing me to do whatever I wanted on her quilt top. Now I need another one to see if my ideas for improvement would actually work!
Comments
We all have to start somewhere and this is a great piece!