Out of My Comfort Zone

I started free motion quilting last year. In fact, I started almost exactly one year ago. I have done mostly meandering, which I am comfortable with at this point. I tried loop D loops which didn't go well at all for me. I've used stencils which went great, but it's a lot of work to do all of that marking. I've done Baptist fans with no marking and it looked OK. I got a couple of DVD's on free motion quilting, but between being very busy and just chicken, I mostly kept meandering.

I have a bunch of baby quilts I made when I was trying to use up some denim squares and some flannel. The seams are really thick because of the fabrics involved, so I wanted to do some quilting that stayed away from the corners of the squares. Today I felt brave and just went for it. The only practice I did was some doodling on the back of an envelope yesterday.


Here is a close-up of the quilting I did, and honestly, I'm pretty proud of myself. It's far from perfect, but that's not the point. The point is I went out of my comfort zone today, and the results are passable! This design worked up very quickly, and I actually quilted the whole center before I even took a break. I came back after my usual break of unloading and loading the dishwasher, switching the loads of laundry, and helping with the grandtwins (which is the fun part of my break!), and meandered in the borders. I was on a roll so I got out some binding and finished the quilt.

Here is the back of the quilt. This quilt is going to some friends of DD#3 who are having a baby girl. I told DD#3 she could pick the backing fabric. She chose the salmony-pink color to match the butterflies. The thing is I didn't have enough of that to make the backing. I dug out some orphan blocks, and thought surely this will make it enough. Nope, not even close. I got out the rest of the border fabric, which I knew I didn't have much of and voila!, just enough to piece a backing. There are some strings of the pink left from trimming before binding, but not even enough to make a 1 1/2" strip.

Here is the front of the quilt. I love making baby quilts. You get the quick finish that feels so good. Next in the quilting queue are the samurai/geisha quilts for the grandtwins. I have the Juki all threaded for working on the geisha quilt tomorrow if I get any time since I'm babysitting. Freehand Baptist fans are going on that quilt.