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Quick Quilt Top Series – win our finished quilt!
After three days of voting for your favorite quilting design in our second Quick Quilt top series, Design 2 beat out the other two possibilities by more than 50 percent. Looks like feathers are still a very popular quilting motif!
What colors and fabrics did you envision for the winning quilt layout that voters selected? Many of you commented that the layout reminded you of flowers. So, I played with all sorts of fabric variations, including bold batiks, vibrant Kaffe Fassett florals, and some lovely Tula Pink prints.
All of them brought a different dimension to the quilt. However, my stash of Kaffe fabrics overpowered the flower “petals” in the piecing layout and made them feel disjointed from one another. I love Tula’s creative prints and color palette, but several of the fabrics in my collection are directional. I wanted to try a new cutting ruler and a fast cutting technique to make the quilt blocks, so that made it impractical to use directional prints. (That said, the quilt could be spectacular with some fussy cutting for directional prints!)
With the ongoing health crisis across the world right now, I decided that some bright, bold, cheery fabrics and a fresh white background would do wonders to lift my spirits. I hope it does the same for you!
And you can make your day even brighter by winning this lovely lap quilt, along with a basket of quilting goodies provided courtesy of APQS!
To win this lap quilt, please comment on this or this Facebook post or this Instagram post by noon on Friday, March 20 and we will pick a winner at random.
I’ve always been a freehand machine quilter, but I’m also a quilting gadget junkie. If it can make things faster or easier, I’m all for it…including using a computer to do mundane quilting tasks or lots of repetitive designs. I used a stylus on the APQS Quilt Path tablet to draw the feather shape I wanted to use in the drunkard’s path ‘pie wedges.’ It has easy digitizing tools that allowed me to smooth out my jagged lines and perfectly align the double stitching over the feather tops.
Even with years of practice, I’m still not perfect at freehand quilting those backtracking lines over the top of feathers, but the computer makes me look awesome—that is if I place the designs in the right direction! (I admit to pulling out my seam ripper a time or two on this quilt. )
With the feathers finally all going in the right direction and a little more confidence, I created the diamond designs for the open areas on the quilt. If you look closely, some of the quilting lines create interlocking circles—almost like a double wedding ring quilt. I stitched in the ditch around the fabrics that created circles, then used the computer to create the arches that form the larger circles.
The drunkard’s path units finish to 6 inches, making the quilt 48 inches square—a nice size for a baby quilt or even a small lap quilt. The quilting design adds some pizzazz without being too dense, giving it an airy feeling and softer drape—perfect for spring!
