Peach Fuzz

 

This month's Electric Quilt design challenge is using the paper pieced flying geese block, Simple Design. I don't always do these, but it's fun to give them a try just to keep my EQ8 skills alive and in my mind. It's fun to try and use a block that you normally wouldn't choose. Paper-pieced flying geese? Bleah!

I wanted to try a design using the Pantone color of the year, Peach Fuzz. This is a rather unlikely color for me to choose to use in such a big way, but I kind of like it here. It's warm and sort of soft looking--comfortable. If I were to actually make this quilt, I would be very unlikely to piece the solid color blocks but would instead just use squares of the solid fabric and quilt in the outline of the block design lines.

Two X's Question

The first design for getting some quilting done on the houses I came up with was to do two X's one for the "window" and one for the door, with the bottom of the door and the top of the two sides of the houses. It isn't quite enough stitching.

It's almost enough given all the free motion quilting around the house, as well as the horizontal line of walking foot quilting between the rows of houses.

But when there's no sky space between the houses, there's a hand's width of non-quilted space.

That's too big of a gap, I think. Also, I don't really look how floppy the sides and roofs of the houses look in comparison. But I don't want to do more free motion quilting and get really dense with it, this is a bed quilt after all and it needs to be soft and flexible. 

I bet if I washed and dried this quilt I wouldn't feel that way, most of this fabric is not pre-washed so it's going to shrink up at least somewhat. What would happen if I tried that and then re-evaluated the need for more quilting beyond the two X's? I don't think I've ever tried quilting then washed and dried and then went back to do more quilting. It seems kind of risky and I've spent a whole lot of time on this one already. Seems like I'm talking myself out of it, doesn't it?
 

A Drawing Board Of Sorts

 

Today in unnecessary products. Dry-erase index cards. I honestly have no idea why these were in my Amazon cart, I heard something somewhere or read it, and I ordered some out of curiosity. I think I need to start keeping better track of this as a lot of times I leave things in my cart for a month. Anyways, they showed up and I am stumped and intrigued just by the idea--much less the reality of this odd product. I truly do not understand the purpose of these things. They smudge, just like a dry erase board does. They never dry so these are not portable or for long-term or important use. Temporary use only.

I kind of like the colors,  the pens included with built in erasers are quite handy. But again, what are these for? Thinking of all the things I've used index cards (or dry erase boards) for over the years, mostly as homemade flashcards to study, for ICAD (index card a day), for making lists and keeping track, for labels in clear plastic boxes. None of those things would be accomplished by using this product. You can't write on them and then stack them up and carry the stack around in your backpack (and surely kids are using apps now for flashcard kind of memorization). Just a weird thing. 

I came up with two quilt related ideas, block designs, and to practice quilting designs.Of course you can do this on actual paper index cards, or scrap paper or whatever else just as well.

I sat down to try and figure out how to quilt inside the houses on my Village/Japanese Houses quilt. and I ended up drawing and erasing several times an idea for anchoring down the houses that have only been quilted around. It was fairly easy to prop it up next to my sewing machine as I tried out the final idea to refer to. And it helped to practice the directions of the lines a few times. Could I have just as easily done this on paper? Yes.

 Back to the drawing board though, as it's still not quite enough stitching for the houses that are right next to each other with no sky in-between. Guess I can erase and try again on the card.

Houses Under The Needle

 

I've gotten a lot of the quilting done on the Japanese Houses or Village quilt done. It's mostly just walking foot, anchor it down sort of quilting, but it was a lot just to get started on it. Now I'm on to figuring out how to feature each house. I'm thinking I'll meander about in the "sky" of each block and the sky vertical separators, and then do something on each window and or door? Not sure yet.

Working on this quilt today I was so struck by the difference just in the colors from the Trinket quilt. This quilt is absolutely crazy and packed with vibrant color and pattern from all the variety of Japanese fabrics. But it's not super-saturated like the Alison Glass fabrics I'm using for Trinket. I like them both a whole lot, but for very different reasons.

Clover Curves

 

I've now gotten a bit more quilting done on the Clover quilted pillow top. I've finished with the lines along the four sides of each block's center square, and I've also gone around the interior edge of each flower. Those are of course sort of curves, but somehow they're not very visible Instead it's a lot of straight lines that are really showing up. So, now I'm adding even more curves that count. Starting in one corner I'm doing some widely spaced echoed curve lines. 

I like the look of those curves and will probably do the whole piece like this, with possibly stopping the curved lines once they reach the center. And then starting another set of curves coming from the other four corners. I'm using my walking foot with the little quilting guide bar snapped onto it. It's working pretty well so far.

To The Center

 

So far so good, almost all of the colors are quilted on the Come Through quilt. I'm really liking the look of the fabric as I'm doing the walking foot echo lines. I am getting a little tired of all the linear stuff and am thinking of doing the cream (background-ish) sections free-motion and curvy. I think in the center of each square I'll do a hand-embroidered X as well. I liked the look of that combination of hand and machine quilting on the Doors Unopened quilt.