Have you all been able to sneak some precious quilting time into your holiday vacations? I know I've been enjoying some much needed vacation to finish up lots of projects. This is a quilt I just finished before Christmas that I started, oh, 2 years ago? Or was it 3?
It's called "Wonky Town", and it's now hanging proudly in my daughter's room. It started out as me experimenting with Wonky Log Cabin blocks from all my scraps, but then I lost a little steam and the eight finished blocks just sat in my UFO pile. Then last April I joined up with some bloggers on Flickr in a wonky quilt block swap, and I decided this was the perfect opportunity to dust off those blocks. I asked the other members to send me wonky houses and trees, and I made a couple of my own. Those are what became the focal point of the quilt. I added a solid border to frame it and some rainbow binding, and Wonky Town was born! It's not without its flaws, but I love it!
Because I knew this quilt was for hanging on a wall and because it had so much white space, I decided to try out some really dense free-motion quilting. Now keep in mind when you look at this quilting detail shot that I did this all on my Juki TL-2010--a home sewing machine, not a long arm, so be gentle. :) I'm very proud of how this quilting came out.
I used the Ocean Current design from Leah Day's wonderful quilting pattern site in the white areas because I thought it resembled wind. I sure learned a lot about echo quilting doing this part! I think this area took me about 10 hours of quilting time. Whew! In the houses and trees I did different freehand designs to complement the shapes using blendy thread colors. In the log cabin blocks I did square spirals. All of it was freehand with no marking, which was very fun and freeing.
Because my Juki has a little cone thread adaptor built right on it, I used our EssentialPRO in Cream for the background quilting. I had Essential Cotton in White in the bobbin the whole time because I had a lot of bobbins already wound. I must say, I am now an EssentialPRO convert. When people talk about polyester thread not being linty, I now know exactly what they mean. After 10 hours of quilting, I had barely any lint to clean out of my machine, even having cotton thread in the bobbin. By contrast, I used Essential Cotton thread for the houses and trees (about 1 hour of quilting time) because I had more colors of it, and I cleaned about a marble sized ball of lint out afterward. Big difference! I highly recommend the EssentialPRO if you do any quilting on your home machine and have a cone thread adaptor (either built in like my machine does, or separate, like this popular one we sell). Coincidentally, our EssentialPRO is on sale for 20% off right now for a few more days, so if you've been wanting to try it out, now is a great time. Sale ends 12/31/11. I know I just stocked up on several of the neutral colors to have on hand for future quilting! The dense freemotion quilting was very time-intensive, but it was really fun, so I know I'll be doing it again sometime.
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