Saturday, September 3, 2011

Quilt-as-you-go Blocks

I have a series of blocks that I hand pieced last year from scraps that I won as a give-away from Nadine.  I was in a "make it all by hand" phase.  However, I have since decided that it'd make a great quilt as you go quilt to practice different quilting techniques.

This block told me to follow the lines in the plaid.  So I did, using both red and black thread and the walking foot.

Here, I mirrored the grid from the center, but added some extra black lines in the outside frame.


The center & mat on this one are plaid, but the outer borders just stripes in one direction.


I wanted to add more texture so the yellow is hand stitched and the red center and black border are machine stripes.
This one is a hodge-podge with FMQ in red and yellow as well as walking-foot straight lines and a couple lines of yellow hand stitching.

I used Leah Day's Matrix design for this mat.


And her Wormholes for this one.


By this point I was gaining confidence and started to echo the circles I did previously with the balls, and echoed outward.

By the end of the day I was thinking that I actually knew what I was doing and made up this fill that used the flowers on the print as the center of a 5 petaled flower that I then added an echo to before moving to the next.

This is what it looks like on the back.  I am very pleased. 

I am not as pleased about the volume of thread that I went through though.  The yellow on 3 (partial) blocks sucked up an entire 100 meter spool!

I'm not sure if I want to dedicate that much of my fabric budget to thread.  I'll stock up tomorrow at the fabric store's 50% off thread sale while I decide.

3 comments:

Raewyn said...

Using a quilt as you go technique to practise your quilting is a great idea! Neat to see all the different designs that you have done - love the flowers in the last pic.

Benta AtSLIKstitches said...

A great idea and lovely quilting!

Lynne said...

Thanks for showing us some great quilting ideas. I look forward to seeing how you put the blocks together!