Learned so much at the Cindy Needham workshop!

I had a fabulous learning experience today. Here is my unfinished work from the workshop.

Pictured above is the front.

Below is the back.

This was my first time quilting with wool batting. I felt like I was sewing on butter. It was so easy to slide around in my machine.

This type of cloth is called cherrywood fabric. I had never heard of it before but I really love it. 

For the bobbin I used 60 wt. Bottom line thread. I have never tried using a thinner thread in the bobbin but it works really well. Cindy brought so many types of great thread along. I am going to have to go thread shopping now. I didn't realize how important thread choice is before.

 

New mystery quilt

Well, fall is here. We just had our first Crescent Quilters meeting of the year. We have "school year" beginning and endings to our year. I came home with instructions for choosing fabric for this year's mystery quilt. This is very exciting for me. Here are the fabrics I have chosen for this year's quilt.

I hope they work out!

Dense quilting makes unquilted areas pop

I am so excited about how this quilting is turning out. I wanted this block to have little houses with a heart. This is to symbolize that the heart is in one's home. I densly quilted the area around the heart but left the heart unquilted. See how the heart just pops? It almost looks like I stuffed it with extra batting but I didn't.

FMQ disaster recovery

I had some free motion quilting that I really didn't like. It took only a few minutes to stictch it but nearly two hours to pick it out. I knew almost right from the beginning that I didn't like it. At first I thought that if I just keep throwing more thread at it that somehow it would improve. Well it didn't. It was just going from bad to worse. I had to take my seam ripper and tweezers to it. I had to be very careful because I didn't want to damage the fabric. Once all the thread was out I was left with a bunch of small holes from the needle. I had to get rid of them. See them on the blue square?

I took a soaking wet facecloth and dabbed it onto the area. I was really happy that once it dried the holes were no longer visible.

Now the block is redone. I choose a completly different design. I am happy that I took the time to pick it all out. I like the way it turned out now. I can't see where I picked it out at all.

FMQ— mixing curves with straight lines

Something I learned recently is that curves look great with some straight lines mixed in close to them. I had this concept in mind when planning how to FMQ this block.

Although my straight lines aren't as straight as I would have liked them to be they do break up the curves look quite nicely.