Monday, March 23, 2015

Scribbling like a kid again

I think I fell in love this weekend...with a quilting filler.  I love taking classes on Craftsy.  It is a site where you can purchase all kinds of online classes...not just quilting...drawing, knitting, cooking, cake decorating, woodworking, gardening and so much more.  It's crazy!  You can access them 24/7 and post your questions and read others questions as you watch the videos.  I posted a question for the first time this weekend and was quite impressed that the instructor responded within 12 hours.

My love affair was sparked when I watched Cindy Needham's class called Design it, Quilt it: Free Form Techniques.  I'm not sure why I waited so long to take this class.  I knew she would be talking about stencils and I have never used them, so I was not sure how relevant the class would be for me.  All I can say is I wish I had downloaded it before now.  One of the topics she covered was shadow and sunshine with in the quilting.  This was something I had never considered before...creating shadowing.  It's easy to look at a painting or drawing and see these techniques, but I had never really thought about it in quilting.

In the beginning, if I needed a background filler I would have just tried stippling, because it was what I knew how to do.  As I felt more comfortable moving the fabric under the needle I added other fillers to my list and learned that some fillers would make things stand out better.
I used loops as a filler in this boarder to create diamond shapes, though I would not say that it creates much shadow.
I used back and forth lines in the in the white blocks of the 16 patches to make the unquilted pink squares stand out more, getting slightly more dense and more shadow.
I used Kathleen from Kathleen Quilts tutorial on doing these flying geese to create quilted blocks in the sashing of this quilt.  My lines are closer together and creates even more shadow, making my little birds stand out as they fly.

Now to meet my new best friend...scribbling.  
Honestly, it's not that pretty to look at on paper and it breaks all the rules, which makes it pretty easy to do.  WARNING: YOUR LINES WILL CROSS.   I played around on some scrap sandwiches before I actually tried it on something I was working on.  
 I note of advice if you are using a thread color matching the fabric...
 I marked around my line of echo stitching with blue water soluble pen so that I didn't go crazy and quilt over it.  Sometimes when you are zooming around, it's easy to get carried away.
 This is the center of the mini quilt I'm working on and I still  have quite a bit more to do, but I love the effect of all the dense quilting.  I'm not sure if the pictures do it justice, but it almost looks like a delicate lace in between the feather plums.


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