The Free Motion Challenge teacher for August is Wendy Sheppard, who blogs at Ivory Spring. In her lesson, she showed us a quilting motif modeled after a jester's hat, like this:
This was a real challenge for me, trying to wrap my head and muscle memory around the motif, especially moving from one "hat" to the next. There were a lot of
I felt like I wasn't improving at all after pages and pages of doodling!
Finally, I printed out Wendy's drawings of the motif and darkened them with a Sharpie, then traced over them until I better understood the design.
The drawings started getting better, and I got brave enough to approach the sewing machine!
And actually, the quilting didn't turn out too badly. I had a few places where I boxed myself into a corner, and a few places where the quilting wasn't uniformly dense, but all in all, I and pretty happy with the results.
I felt like I really learned a lot this month. As I was doing the quilting, I was able to keep my machine speed and hands consistent, and I also think I am beginning to "get" all of the parts of the process, especially being aware of where I am stitching and where I want to go next. Perfect? Certainly not, but I am making progress!
Whenever I spoke to my mother on the phone, she would tell me she was a "happy camper." Well, this month, I'm a "happy quilter!"
Good job. This was a lot harder then it appeared.
ReplyDelete