Quilting post

Ah!  You mean Tanya's been up in the sewing room? 

Yes...  A little.  I am slowly machine quilting the Fiery Starr quilt and still have a long ways to go.

And with that on the sewing machine table I don't get much else done up there (can't use the sewing machine with a hulking bed-cover quilt hooked into it).  So I finally disconnected the Fiery Starr quilt (it sounds like a big process but it isn't... just lift the quilting foot and take the thing off the table!) and started quilting something a bit smaller....  The secret game quilts that my friends and I are in the process of making (the snowman print.  Remember that?)

Well, I made a flimsy that is cute but I can't show here.  And I decided to do some quilting on it...  machine quilting.  And after many trials and errors I've come up with something I'm rather proud of so I thought since we are heading into the winter season that maybe someone else would like to give it a try.

Snowflakes!  They are trying to be snowflakes.  Do they look like snowflakes to you?

This isn't really very difficult... it just takes a bit of preparation.  Go put a quilt sandwich in your domestic sewing machine and give it a try.

First of all, I marked circles (penciled around a couple different sized spools of cone thread... larger circles).

And then I drew in three lines cutting across the circles.

And then I started in the middle of the circle and quilted outward to the circumference and back... six times, so that I had six spokes of a wheel.

 

Next I sewed up one spoke a few stitches and then took a dive into the center of that pie-piece, and went back to the second spoke.  This takes a little eyeballing and I suppose I could have marked the center of each pie-piece but no one is going to look that closely.  The important thing is to make a point rather than a curve.

Ta-da!  That makes a small six-pointed start within my spokes!

 

Next I went back up a spoke a bit and sewed a few stitches to one side (diagonally) and then the other side, and then up the spoke to do it again.  I ended up back in the center of the snowflake and cut the thread there.

 

I'm quite pleased with my snowflakes and in variegated blue thread they do look icy.

 Please give snowflake quilting a try for your winter quilt!