November FMQ Challenge Entry

November Sew Cal Gal's FMQ Challenge Entry!

Whew! Going right up to the last minute this month...

This month's expert was Sarah Vedeler. Her tutorial on spirals was outstanding! She had wonderful materials that we could print out and trace, and believe me, I did. It was all about control this month, and for me, it was a real challenge!

I knew I was in trouble when I started tracing and found it very difficult to stay on the lines with a pen and paper! I traced and traced, but it was really hard for me to keep those spirals round. I then moved on to her sheets with guidelines in which we drew our own spirals, not much better. So I kept practicing. Here's some samples:

 Then I started doodling. I doodled a ton of spirals, but without guidelines. That was a lot easier, but just eyeballing the spirals sure didn't help with my control. It was more fun, though. Examples:

So, it's the last day of the month, and I really need to sew. I marked the grids on my sample sandwich, took a deep breath, and gave it the old college try. After removing the grid, here's the product:

I found it very difficult to keep these round, obviously, especially near the edge of the sample. Don't think I'll be trying this in any outside borders anytime soon.

The other project I finished this month was from a workshop I took about a year ago. It was a wool applique workshop by Roberta Williams, who does these beautiful quilts with appliqued birds. It was a lot of fun to do, and I loved the results. Here's the finished walll hanging:

The colors are much richer in person. And for the first time, I quilted the daylights out of this one, which really made the birds "pop"! Without everything I've learned doing Sew Cal Gal's FMQ Challenge, I would never have attempted this. Thanks so much, Sew Cal Gal!

Tomorrow is December, the last month in the Challenge. I can't wait!

October FMQ Challenge

October Sew Cal Gal's FMQ Challenge Entry!

 This month our expert was Teri Lucas, whose tutorial was actually pretty challenging for me. She asked us to quilt on silk or a silk/cotton blend with two different layers of batting (cotton underneath and wool on top) and with different threads (meaning starting and stopping multiple times.) She also encouraged us to use our seam rippers to get things just the way we wanted them.

I did use the materials she requested - a light green dupioni silk for the top layer, cotton and wool batting, and both trilobal polyester and metallic threads. I used a light spray basting to get the silk to adhere to the wool batting - couldn't seem to get safety pins through the layers without making big holes and pulls in the silk.

We started by writing our name, then filling around with various filler patterns. My results:

The least successful filler was the nautilus shell pattern with the pebbles. I had done a lot of drawing, but it just didn't seem to work for me. Needs more practice. I did like the way the wool layer and the silk top made the quilting very puffy and well defined. Thank you, Teri for the challenge. I will probably use wool batting and/or a combination a lot more now that I see what it does. And silk when I can afford it...

I also took a workshop from Ann Fahl this month, Mastering Metallics. We embroidered and quilted with metallic thread which was challenging (the stuff breaks a lot!) but really beautiful and fun to see the sparkle. Ann is a great teacher and she gave us so many tips on adjusting our machines to minimize the breaking. I'm posting a picture of my project, though it's hard to see the sparkle so it really doesn't do the piece justice. But it was fun and I love the results.

They say practice makes perfect. Well, it definitely makes "better". My quilting has improved a lot this year, thanks mainly to the Sew Cal Gal Challenge. Just two more months. Can't wait to see what they'll bring!