Monday, September 26, 2016

Feather Quilting

Back in August, I managed to finish making some giant scrappy blocks from my abundance of green scraps, and turned it into this oversized churndash top.  
I even managed to do the quilting on the green part of the design before I left on vacation.   I used some of the Crayola washable markers to draw out the free-hand design.   I found that it really helped to keep the design flowing and pretty even.  You can see even from the back that this quilting is still pretty loose and free-flowing.

The next 3 photos are today's quilting.  I don't actually follow the lines very well, but having them drawn out to start with, improves the odds that the feathers will turn out like my brain imagines them.  I did a slightly different technique in today's section, backtracking only the ends of the feathers rather than the whole thing.  I think it really helps.  And you can really see the difference in the lower right section above where I didn't do that and the fact I can't follow the same line exactly is clear 



For the fill on the new sections, I was inspired by quilting from Ivory Spring Blog.  Go here to see the gorgeous feather variations.  My borrowed inspirations were the circular bits.  I took some plates and cups to mark some circles on the large sections I was planning to fill so I would have intentional, but random circle motifs to work around.  She uses more echoing and feather shape variations.  More things for me to work on.

I need to finish this up so I can start one of the 6 quilts I designed based upon designs from Kyiv's St Sophia Cathedral. Here are some hints of upcoming quilts: