My sewing room is sometimes a family gathering place. I like to think that is because everyone is interested in seeing the progress on my latest project. It is more probably because our computer is on my desk which is also in my sewing room. As a result, I often get suggestions on what to do with my current sewing project.Earlier this week M came in and saw the HST piles. He commented that I make a lot of quilts with white background. M often has good artistic instinct so I listened to him and tried putting a row of the HSTs on a different color background - the charcoal kona that I had purchased for my "zinnia quilt" - (I had tried a few different designs for this zinnia inspired quilt but was not happy with any of them) ANYWAY, I like the charcoal but not with the white of the HST blocks. Next, I made a few HST blocks with the charcoal ground.
After making a few of those, I remembered the fabrics that I had pulled together at the start of the zinnia project. So I made more HSTs with all of those fabrics.Now, in a round about fashion, I am finally making a plan for my Zinnia Quilt.
I am still deciding how I want the single strip of color to look but so far I'm pleased with how this is progressing. I tried a single strip of triangles, and also a double strip with the triangles side by side oriented the same way but both of those layouts seemed boring compared to these.
Perhaps I should wait to ask M's opinion before I go any further.I can always work on the big pile of white half square triangles until I make up my mind.
The Vines
When machine quilting, I usually don't mark the quilt first. I enjoy coming up with designs that I can draw "free hand" at the machine. I thought this quilt called for something formal like a feathered vine seen on many traditional and Amish quilts. I tried to free hand a feathered vine on practice piece and it just didn't work at this scale. These strips are 9.5 inches wide, a pretty big space to fill evenly without marking. I, then, drew out a pattern, a "free hand" vine that is the same distance to each side of the strip. The length of the waves are not necessarily equal but the width is the same. I marked the sides and the center line as a guide on the fabric.
I stitched the center with a double line about an eight of an inch apart. After trying and failing at free handing the feathers on the machine on a sample, I marked each feather before sewing on the quilt.The template for the vine can be placed four different ways by flipping it around. That will give a little bit of variation in the vines while still having them all almost the same.I am pretty happy with the result. I still have three more strips to do but each one gets a little easier.
I plan to do some filler quilting in the areas around the vine. That should make the feathers visually "pop". The thread I am using is a really pretty brown that matches the fabric beautifully. It matches so well that it is almost impossible to see the lines I have sewn when I need to backtrack.I hope you had a great weekend doing something fun.
