Quilting Practice

Getting this thing basted took me long enough that I didn't want to set any rules for getting it quilted. That might not be the best approach, but I learned a lot while I was working on it! And sometimes, I think it is good to have 'learning experience' projects instead of 'this needs to be good' projects...

The biggest lesson: I'm not sure I'm done quilting it...

I knew that I wasn't keeping the amount of quilting the same throughout the piece. I thought that wouldn't be an issue, even though I know that the 'rules' say that you should try to keep the quilting fairly similar throughout. Some of the 'lighter' blocks are okay, others are screaming out for more. The 'heaviest' block is almost too heavy, especially compared to everything else.

My quilting in this lovely green square is fairly heavy, for all that I was 'doodling' and had no plan for what I was doing! I kind of echoed the triangles, then got a little crazy filling in the rest of the open space. I started in this field, and quickly realized I didn't want to go that heavily throughout the rest of the quilt. I'd never finish at that rate! I wish I'd started elsewhere and saved this one for last -- it might have had a better concept for how much I wanted to do...

Meanwhile, the large block just over that is very lightly quilted, and I suspect needs a little more... My initial goal was to practice curves by going around those circles, but when my sewing machine light went out, it got even harder to copy. I added in some straight lines to help hold the fabric in place while I looped around, but when the light burned out, I tried to call that good enough.

It's not good enough. I really think I'll be working on this area again once I've got my machine working properly again (light replaced among other things). I might even break out my back up machine and work on it between now and then. The loops aren't looking too pretty, but I have lots of chances to be practicing on it and I would like to be more comfortable with this kind of quilting pattern. (This is another area where I struggle with the feed dog issue -- I tried dropping mine again, since the machine needs to go to the shop anyway, why not!? That was worse. Much worse. But using the feed dogs was a challenge too. Would a walking foot help here? I'm supposed to be ordering one, but have put it off trying to decide between a walking foot and a darning / free motion type foot.)

I aimed for a middle of the road amount of quilting in the two blue rectangles -- and I should have gone heavier. I also should have basted more carefully (apparently). I had pinned these blocks about every 2 inches, but it clearly wasn't enough -- as you can see in both, there's pulling and puckering all over those blocks! The central cheater block was traced stitch in the ditch style and looks good in person, for all that it's lightly quilted.

You can see the quilting a little better on the back, for all that it's quite busy fabrics! This is the back over the two large blue fields and the cheater block. I love the way the cheater one turned out!

Each of the little blocks was quilted differently, some better than others...

The pictured two are my favorites. Some of the others are... less lovely. But I'm not picking the quilting out. This is just a picnic / sleeping bag / camping kind of quilt; it's okay if it is less than lovely. It will help me feel good about it getting used -- and the practice and freedom to totally screw up parts of it have been good for my quilting skills.

I squared it up already, which meant losing some of the grey border from around the green field (sad moment, I really wanted to keep that), and it's really ready to bind -- except that the more I look at it the more I think I've got to go back to the largest field (top left) and work on some more of those circles. The blue fields would benefit from some pebble quilting if I could do that (unlikely to happen without free motion working properly!), but I might be able to convince myself to leave them alone. I haven't done anything in the light grey border around the cheater block, but if I'm putting this one back through the machine, I might come back to it too. All the borders are fairly simply quilted (a line or two) and could benefit from more work too.

I know there comes a point where you can over work a project, but I think this one needs just a little bit more. Then again, I also feel like I'm on a short time line with that other project, so this one might have to get a 'good enough' pass for now and come back after some use...