June FMQ Challenge

I was incredibly inspired when I saw this month's FMQ challenge by Cindy Needham.  By combining a few straightforward elements she has made a really eye-catching design.

Unfortunately I didn't finish the June FMQ in time >_< and I am about to go on vacation for two weeks so I wanted to show where I am right now.

Ms. Needham challenged me to try this challenge without my stitch regulator.  I have pretty much never tried to free motion quilt without it.  Getting the "hum purr" down was quite easy, you can hear it even when using the stitch regulator.  What was much harder was remembering that the machine wouldn't automatically speed up when I did.  As a result I had a number of places with pretty wide stitching.

Here is my practice swatch.  I stitched a leaf and filled it with lines.  I had a hard time at the spots where you are turning and tracing over the outline a cm to start the new line, if that description makes sense.  I think retracing the outline a few times could hide this.

I enjoyed making the feather fit a weird space.  My feather leaves are still not the lovely teardrops they should be.

I also am not used to the paisley shape (hey, a teardrop!) or the s-curves that I attempted to fill it with.  My string of pearls wasn't great either, although I love the idea of using it as the spine of your feather.

So here is my actual block.  I know it's impossible to see, but this is a placemat and it's the perfect size for a practice swatch, plus it's a lot more practical than just stitching on muslin because then I toss the muslin into a corner and don't know what to do with it.  If you click to enlarge the image, much more of it comes out.

Here I stitched some fun curvy lines all over, then proceeded to fill them in.  And the "not done" part is the chunks that I didn't get around to doing yet, maybe 1/3rd of it.

The good news is that I just got a pretty cool giant single panel quilt top that I am going to free motion quilt the heck out of, and I will have plenty of opportunities on that to do more of these designs.