Some progress - I've been quilting

I finished quilting this version of my pattern Consider on Thursday night and took pictures on Friday morning, and yet, it is already Saturday morning before I have had a chance to share them here. Oh well. And not the best photos, again, oh well, its a progress post, right?

I had a lot of fun doing all the quilting on this quilt, especially the borders. This approach of breaking up the quilting so that it looks a lot like ariel views of fields on the prairie was totally inspired by the class I took with the amazing Krista Withers at QuiltCon, and also by Carolyn Friedlander's quilts and her fabric patterns on Doe too - Carolyn has also been my teacher, at Sewdown Nashville.



I used a number of different aqua and yellow Aurifil 50wt threads to quilt this quilt and played with straight line patterns. All the quilting was done free hand on my Millenium longarm quilting machine. The pattern fabrics are all from Fabric Spark, and were a blogger bundle I put together for Daryl a few months ago. And yes, I will totally finish writing this pattern this weekend and get it to the testers so it will be available soon.



I consider my approach to quilting to be industrial modern. My lines are not perfectly straight or perfectly spaced, and I love it that way. And I love quilting straightish lines most. The pattern on the right is the only one with a curve on this quilt. I think that this mid century wave can play well on a straight line quilt.



I had a lot of thread breaks while quilting the border on this quilt. When I get tired, I tend to jerk my longarm just a little on the turns and I think that is the cause of the thread breaks. As the thread breaks mount up, I know it is time to stop for the night. I anchor the threads as I restart the lines, but I prefer to also mend the thread ends in rather than just snip them. I can do that along with the binding.



Quilting the border in chunks like this makes it nice and easy to quilt in the space I have available on the longarm. It takes a lot longer than just doing lines across the full space, but I am loving the impact. I can't wait to see how it looks after a wash and dry so I'll be getting the border on this weekend.

So as the sun is coming up, I am looking forward to some sewing time today.

It is National Quilting Day in the USA and I see references to World Wide Quilting Day on the internet too - in any event it seems like it is definitely a day to be quilting.

Best,

Leanne