Free Motion Quilting Challenge

 I have to admit that I fell behind with the FMQ Challenge  hosted by SewCalGal during March, which is a shame really as it was a great tutorial by one of my favourites,  Ann Fahl.  Luckily I managed to download it before it was removed from the website and am now able to add it to my folder.  

There were a number of examples of fmq shown in the turorial, and these are just a couple squeezed onto my sample piece.

Not too bad, but think my 'circles' need a bit of work :-)

April's challenge was set by Don Linn and is really interesting as he shows how to create your own quilting stencils using tulle. Some of you may already know this technique, but for those who don't and are interested, you can find the video here.

Using the tulle, embroidery hoop and some markers, this

and this

became these !

Not too bad for first efforts, and certainly something I will use again, so big thanks to Don for the tutorial.


Sorry about the poor quality of the photos, but grey, dark and wet is the order of the day in Brittany at the moment !

A Finish At Last

Here we are already into the last week of April and this is my first (big) finish for 2012 !  No reason for dragging my feet other than loosing the urge to sew for some weeks, and not really knowing why but hoping it was just the  'Winter Blues'. 

After giving myself a good talking to, I decided to tackle quilting my Carpenter's Star top made from a pattern by Mary Johnson, and finally it is finished !

Feeling that the quilt deserved more than stippling, I thought to try my hand at free form feathers a la Patsy Thompson as well as some feathered wreaths with the help of a stencil.

Hard work it was and long with it - I reckon I spent more hours quilting this than any other quilt ever!  Was it worth the effort - well I think so and I am absolutely delighted with the results given this is the first time I have tackled something other than stippling on a quilt this size.

Now to catch up with all the things that didn't get done :-)

Playtime

After my last moan about the grey weather, we had the most amazing hot spell that I personally have ever experienced at the end of March with temperatures around 30C !  Not ones to let an opportunity like this pass we  took off to the Finistere coast for totally unplanned break and had a wonderful time!

I will write more about this beautiful area in a future post, but what I wanted to ask you is - have you had a play with the new Picasa softwear yet ?  No, well let me show you .

We stayed in this lovely Chambres d'Hotes

or was it like this ?

maybe this ?

or one of these  ?

Go try it yourself and see how much fun it is :-)