A friend on FB asked me to post Beach Town. As you regular readers know, I get around to posting everything eventually and this past week has been a bit of a challenge. I wondered whether I should post this on Monday to give you more days to look at, but eventually decided just to stack up a couple of posts today and get through the backlog. When I prepare posts and set them to post on a future date, I can’t link to them until they are posted.
I spent Monday afternoon and evening working on the machine quilting of this piece. I still have the purple part of the road and the sky as well as the flowers to quilt, but am mostly done.
I am pleased with how the piece is shaping up. I liked the fluffiness of it before I began the quilting. Now I really like how flat it gets after quilting.
I have to remember to machine quilt it before I start the hand stitching. I know that will be hard in future Pamela Allen classes because of he flow of the class and how excited I get about the pieces I create in her classes.
It took me a long time (well, a month, which seemed like an eternity) to get back to this piece. I learned something from my mistakes, though:
- cover the batting somehow
- stick or pin everything down really WELL
- Ensure the pieces are large enough to overlap to prevent gap-osis
- machine quilt before hand stitching
I do need more quilting on the sky. I just went around each sunbeam in order to tack down the repaired part of the sky. The other part of the sky is just too fluffy, so I will quilt some more in the area on the right of the piece.
I spent a lot of time on the tree, so that the lean, straight shape would be maintained. I think I succeeded?!
Quilting the bottom was a little more of a challenge because I didn’t want the quilting to stand out. That meant a lot of stopping and starting with new colors. That is ok. I spent some time in the evenings during the week working on little bits of the piece. As I mentioned I still need to quilt the purple part of the road and I think some hand stitching will be required.
I don’t know if I will machine quilt the flowers. I am not that into free motion quilting right now. I may just tack them down a little and then do some detailed hand stitching. It may be that I just bead them to try and maintain the look of the color statement. I haven’t done anything there yet, so I will have think about it some more.We’ll have to see.