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Monday, March 31, 2014

Latest Baby Quilt

I've been keeping quite busy with my competition quilt for MQS this week.  I'm working on a post about the craziness that was the competition quilt.  But in the meantime I wanted to share the quilt I just pulled off the machine. 
My sister-in-law keeps me practicing with baby quilts. The latest one she brought me is cute little farm animals.  I decided instead of using a pantogram I was instead going to use some custom designs I learned to do over spring break. Over spring break I took the class that came with my new longarm.  It was a great one day class that covered all the basics and free motion quilting designs.  Since up to that point I'd only used pantograms through my Pantovision I was very excited to take the class.  I was even more stoked after the class was over and I had 7 more new designs I could do free motion.  
With the quilt my sister-in-law brought me I immediately keyed into the fact that the animals alternated whether their fur was with a curly motif or a lined one.  I decided that I would use the curls I learned in my class in the background of the animals that had curly hair.  I went to work and was quite pleased with the way the background turned out.  I then out lined the animals.  
My curly block.
For the animals with the lined background I decided to get out my ruler and put diagonal lines in the background to fill it.  I easily filled in the background then outlined the animal.  
The lined background.  
Instead of filling in the sashings with designs I decided I wouldn't push my luck and instead just chose to stitch in the ditch along the lines of the printed quilt.  But for the border I got a little bit daring and put the curly motif into the border to frame in the quilt.  Note to self: It's best to continue to go around the quilt in the same direction the entire way.  In the future I think I will just go one direction around the quilt and deal with having to unroll my quilt after I've finished all the other designs than trying to have to work backwards and go the opposite direction with my curls.  I really enjoyed doing this quilt because it's really the first quilt I've worked on that I have had the opportunity to approach it with a mindset beyond a regular repeated pattern.  I was in charge of the design elements, simple as they were, I still kept the quilt flowing while highlighting some pattern elements from the quilt. 
The finished product!

 Hopefully my sister-in-law likes the quilt as much as I do and is forgiving of the directional mistakes in the border.  
I can tell I'm becoming a quilter because I like looking at the back as much as I like the front!



















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