Friday, February 23, 2018

Baby Quilt Progress Kismet be my guide

I have created my quilting plan after watching some Craftsy classes for inspiration.  That was fun.  One thing I learned while watching one of the courses was to let Kismet rule the day.  What a wonderful freeing thought.  Don't worry about your quilting decision, just roll a die or flip a coin and see what happens.  In my case I decided that I wanted to use rulers to make a spinning design in some of the blocks but not all.  I have 71 hourglass blocks and I thought I would like about 25% of them to have the spinning flower design.  I numbered them from 1 to 71 and then used an Excel spreadsheet to generate random numbers from 1 to 4.  Any block with the number 1 would be a flower and the others would be other designs.  That was fun.  It took all the worry out of the process.  

I got out my quilting rulers and fiddled with them till I decided that I wanted to make 5 pinwheels and some  blocks with one of my new Gina Perkes rulers that I think resembles leaves.  I have flowers and leaves and pinwheels on my quilt design.  

I do think that my pinwheel blocks may not "spin" because my peach and tourquoise hour glass blocks are too close in value.  I decided to see if I could get the quilting to help it spin.  I am heavily quilting the peach parts and stitching around the blue/green parts.  I am using my HandiQuilter ruler to help with the straight line quilting, two clamshell Westalee rulers (one from the sampler pack and another from my new mini fill pack).  I quite like working with rulers.  It works just fine on this baby size quilt.  I think for bigger quilts I would use my Tiara rather than my Bernina.   
I stitched in the ditch up on side of the blue triangle.  I used the handiquilter ruler as a stopping point marker for my ruler foot.
I abutted the clamshell ruler to the handiquilter ruler for placement then removed the handiquilter ruler so I could stitch three clamshells across the top of my triangle stopping at the seam and not finishing the last one.
I kept the needle down and snugged a medium clamshell mini fill ruler around my ruler foot.  I stitched round the clamshell until the needle rested in the seam at the other end of the ruler and then slid the ruler down the seam line and snugged it back around the ruler foot again.  Easy Peasey.  I made clamshells until I got back to the center and repeated the steps for the remainder of the pinwheel.
I used my handiquilter ruler with its handy 1/4 inch lines to add straight lines to the peach triangles.  I was thinking that the extra quilting would make the blue parts pop up so the blue/green parts would dominate.  I don't think that worked but I like the result well enough and the pinwheel parts add variety to my quilting plan.  

 I used a variegated 35 weight thread for my flower blocks.  The tension is not quite right,  I used Superior's microquilting thread for the rest of the quilting.  I think it looks great.
 Here it the bat looking from the backside.
Here is my pinwheel. Fronside.
 And backside.

 Here is my star from the back
 My leaf parts.
and my tension problem flower.  Have fun quilting.  I am thinking 4 days to finish the quilting and another 2 for the binding and it will be a quilt.  We will see if my prediction happens.

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