Thursday, October 28, 2021

Paper Chain

After the ultra-colorful and bright Glass Candies, I wanted to pick a quilt top with more subdued colors for my next finish. I decided on Paper Chain, which is a block-of-the-month quilt that I made last year.

The fabric collection I chose is Breeze by Zen Chic, and the layout is from the Quilt Block Cookbook by Amy Gibson. This quilt really gives me a Japanese vibe!

I have never done free-motion quilting on a sampler quilt before, so this was a bit of a new experience. But at the end of the day, it's not that different from non-sampler quilts, except I have a few more blocks to design.

I tend to not quilt very heavily on foreground fabrics, so I came up with a different design for each block mostly by employing straight lines, curvy lines, and an occasional plume feather. But this was the easy part.

The background was more challenging since there was so much negative space. I decided to try a design that was totally new to me: Angela Walters's paisley feathers. It's an intricate looking design that is actually easier than regular feathers, but incredibly exhausting to do. I had to take my time on this so that I didn't get injured.

I had a lot of fun coming up with a design for each block, and though the background was challenging, I'm very satisfied with the final results.

Thursday, October 7, 2021

Glass Candies

Since I've been on a journey lately to finish some of my favorite quilts instead of saving them for later, lately every quilt I've chosen to work on is special. But some are just more special than others.

Glass Candies is one of my all-time favorites. Both the pattern (Dude Ranch) and the fabric (Confetti Ombre) are designed by V & Co. I renamed it Glass Candies because as I was piecing this, I kept thinking of those beautiful Murano glass candies I saw on a trip to Venice.

This quilt is made up of half-square triangles and squares so it was quite easy and lots of fun to put together. The only painful part was assembly as it's assembled on the bias.

I had so much fun coming up with a quilting design for this quilt. I kept things very simple in the foreground (just continuous curves) and went to town in the background, creating geometric secondary designs and complementing them with swirls.

It took me a long time to quilt this, because I was enjoying it so much and wanted to savor the process ... and because it was a lot of quilting. I have the big M-sized bobbin on my longarm, and it still took about 10 bobbins!

I'm thrilled with the end result, as it turned out better than I imagined. This one is a keeper!

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