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Sunday, April 29, 2012

Choosing a Quilting design

On Friday I finished stitching in the ditch around all of my nine patch squares.  I still had stitch length problems, mainly I think from the weight of the quilt making it hard for the feed dogs to move it forward.  This is where having a drop table sure would be nice...

Also, it is obvious, but machine quilting on a quilt is a totally different ball game from working on practice swatches!  It was much harder to deal with the bulk of the quilt and get it to slide around smoothly.  Outlining my cats, something that should have been incredibly simple, still had a lot of little bumps and jagged spots in it because I wasn't used to maneuvering the quilt.

Now I would like to quilt something in the nine-patch squares.  To keep the quilt fluffy I may only do every other square or something, we'll see.  I spent about an hour at the quilt shop flipping through every machine quilting book they had, and "Free-Motion Quilting Made Easy" by Eva Larkin stood out to me as perfect for this project, because all of the designs are made to fit inside squares.

So I sat down with an iphone and the Genius Scan app, scanned all of the designs I liked, and then superimposed them over a nine patch design in photoshop.  What do you think?  Which designs do you like?
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#9
#7
#8


#10
#11
#12
#13
#14
#15



#16
#17
#18



Okay, it was really hard to get all those darn pictures to line up, so I'm giving up.  Sorry for the wonky images. I'm partial to many of them, particularly 16, 11, 7, and 4. I think it will take me a while to pick one and I'll probably have to stitch out a couple to really decide.

2 comments:

  1. I'm going through the same process for my sampler quilt. Every block is different so I'm choosing a different design for each block. I'm doing one at a time. I have also found that a practice swatch is no match for trying to maneuver a quilt. My lines are a bit wavy I think that's the only way we're going to learn. I particularly like #16 and #4. Let me know if you figure out any easy ways of doing this!! I'll let you know if I find a way too!!

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  2. They look so hard to do..whichever you choose, good luck! I've never mastered FMQ

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