Some quilting...

Quilting is something that I've liked to do for awhile. I like piecework, and have done some more complicated things, but I tend to go with simple. I like for quilting to be a quick finish, so I stick with mostly baby quilts with rectangles and triangles. (I also stick to baby quilts because quilting anything bigger is really tough!)


One thing I'm not very good at is binding. I always cheat. So I signed up for a binding class at Home Ec Workshop. It's still kind of cheater binding, because it's all on the machine, but I figure it will look more polished than what I normally do.


For the class, you have to bring something small to try to bind. So I made a placemat out of scraps. These scraps are from the quilt I am actually making- well, was going to make until this new session of classes started and I realized two at a time was insane. It will have to wait.I made this one and just did straight line quilting. In the ditch, and then Xs onto each of the different squares. I did a bunch of various sizes, but there wasn't as much variation as I hoped for.
This is the back of the colorful one. Kevin told me it was a little too "out there" so I made another one, with more basic colors. I did two things wrong: first it is still a bit too "out there". Second, I decided to try free motion quilting for the first time!

You'll notice the "crop" of it is a little odd- the top row is super skinny- I'll explain why later. The free motion quilting was REALLY hard. For those that don't know, when you do that you set the stitch length to zero and put down the feed dogs. This has two results 1) the machine just runs away- it is very hard to control and 2)you control the stitch length by moving the fabric. It was very difficult to figure out how to move it, I was either too slow and the stitches were way too long, or too fast and it looked wonky. You have to also make it go with the speed of your needle. I thought a slower needle would be better, but while it was harder to control, the faster needle speed looks better.
IU had just planned on going up and down the rows, but then I got a little more wild overlapping into the other rows, going back on it. One quilting rule is supposed to be not to overlap threads. I accidentally did, but thankfully there was no Ghostbuster's style "crossing the beams" incident. I think it looks pretty good for a first try.
This is why the crop is wonky. I quilted more than I needed so I could square the edges. I was going to take a little off each side, but in the end I decided to try to free motion sign my name. I thought I did pretty well, so I didn't want to cut it off- so I had to take it mostly off the top.