Wednesday, December 04, 2019

Flow

Flow
70.5" x 86.5"

This design reminds me of liquid motion bubble tumblers. A snapshot in time, it is a great reminder to take time to breathe, slow down, and relax and be in the present. When I post next week, about the back side of this two-sided quilt, I will explain more.


It began as a great opportunity to use up some of my fabric stash.  I love aqua blue so much, that I had a lot of it!  The funniest thing was that as I started using up this collection of blues, I went out and bought some more, which kind of defeated the purpose of using up my stash.  I haven't done this for any of the other stash busting quilts I've made, just this one.  I guess I just need aqua fabric!

Some of these are pretty cute (like the cat faces!!)!  The little house fabric I got while making a commissioned quilt for STOF fabrics.


Here is a shot of the planning part, even though this was mostly random and improvisational, I did not want the vertical seams to fall in the path of the zigzag.


As I would get to each big section where the path would bend (approximately 1/3 of the quilt), I would slice the blue part and insert the section of white. The rotary rulers were so helpful by being marked with 60 and 30 degree angles!
I also had a few difficulties with the geometry along the way.  However, I found that if I thought about it, I could devise an experiment to test my idea before cutting the actual quilt.  The small experiments worked to either show me what I got wrong and try again, or validate what was right.

I thought I would cut the red circles with a circle cutter. I found it easier to cut lots of circles from freezer paper with the circle cutter, and then pressed them to the back of my red fabric and cut the seam allowance with scissors. I then pressed under the edges of the circles using the edge of the paper as a guide.  It made that part so easy!  Then I hand appliqued them to the quilt.


They don't look as flat as I would have liked, but the quilting I have planned will take care of that!
Here's a closeup of the quilting for the red drops. These were done using free motion machine quilting.


I also used a walking foot for the aqua blue part this project.  The lines are quilted every 1/4 inch.  It did not go as smoothly as I expected.  The wrestling of this under the machine was heavy and awkward, and the angles I sewed (even with GREAT pin basting), tended to make big puffy spots in the middle.  It was hard to flatten those without making tucks and folds.  Extremely frustrating after so much work!


I just love looking at all the angles of this quilt! So fun!!



Please stop back by next week for the rest of the story.  That crazy diagonal long lined quilting really distorted the quilt on the back, which actually improved the design (maybe?); here's to happy accidents!

1 comment:

Rachel Parris said...

Another amazing work.