Friday, February 7, 2014

Quilting over snippets

I started the free motion quilting on Tree #4 today.  When I quilted Tree #3, it was the first time I had tried the snippet technique, and I had a lot of trouble with the pieces falling off while I was trying to quilt it.  Not fun!  So this time I really loaded it up with glue first.  I think it is helping.  The presser foot has caught a few edges and lifted them slightly, but no pieces are off of the quilt yet!

I gave a lot of thought to which quilting design to use.  On Tree #3 I did spirals, mostly because that's what Susan Carlson does in her Serendipity Quilts book. I thought the spirals were too challenging, between the snippets falling off and the difficulty of seeing what you are doing, giving the mish-mash of many prints.  And then, when you are done, the design hardly shows!  The snippets themselves are so busy. See what I mean?


So for these reasons I'm trying a variation of stippling that I think looks like bark for the tree. I haven't made up my mind about the background yet.
Here's a closeup:
Machine quilting stippling
 
Another benefit of this design is that it goes so quickly!  I'm linking up to Off the Wall Fridays and the Free Motion Quilting Project.

 

Sunday, February 2, 2014

A productive week

My newest project, Tree #4, is coming along nicely.
Tree art quilt
 
I have all of the snippets in place, so now I need to go back and carefully glue down all of the loose edges. This is fairly time consuming, but I want to be thorough.  Last time, on Tree #3, I skimped on glue and the pieces were falling off as I was try to quilt it. Pretty frustrating!  Also, I made sure to use Aileen's tacky glue throughout, rather than the glue stick I tried before. Hopefully I'll be quilting it next weekend!
 
Here's what the sewing room floor typically looks when I'm working with snippets:
 
 
I find them everywhere. A few weeks ago I felt a scratchy sensation on my arm while I was driving, and I figured out it was from masking tape sticking a snippet to the inside of my sleeve. 
 
In other quilting news, I enjoyed seeing a selection from Quilt National at the Riffe Gallery last week.  The show is open through April 13, so check it out if you are in Columbus!