Wednesday, January 27, 2016

WIP Wednesday: Free Motion Quilting Experiments

This week, I've been working on a bunch of projects, thanks to three days snowed in - like much of the east coast. I feel much more confident going into February!


My brother's birthday is soon. He's a minimalist kind of guy, and while he often encourages my crafting and appreciates my quilts, he insists he doesn't need anything else but the t-shirt quilt I made him a couple years ago. We started talking once when he was visiting, and he admitted that a Game of Thrones wall-hanging would be pretty rad. I said "I'LL MAKE IT" faster than he could even consider his words.

He left the colors up to me ("uh... whatever is normal" - his response when I texted him - fine with me :) ). Black seemed especially captivating for the wolf head and words. I sewed together two different Northcott solid grays (they are SO SOFT) for a bit of a background contrast effect.

The big fun for this mini quilt was the background quilting. Instead of taking the time to applique letters, I decided to "wing it" (my favorite) by tracing the letters with my Hera marker and quilting them instead. I came up with a pretty easy way to make them stand out more with sketch quilting (I'm sure I haven't invented this particular method, but I haven't read anything about my approach before). It's easy and fun, but it does require some intermediate free motion quilting control. Practice, practice!!


You can view my sketch letter quilting tutorial (#sketchletterquilting) right here from Periscope and Katch:


I decided to quilt another part of the background with this building bricks motif. I love the look of sharp, angular quilting for this fierce quilt (literally fierce - that's a wolf head, people). I will happily film and/or write up a tutorial for this if anyone is interested!


More on the inspiration/choices behind this quilt once it's gifted... I've just got the binding and label left!

Linking up to WIP Wednesday.

13 comments:

  1. Your brother should be pleased with his wall hanging, and very masculine too.

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  2. My husband would love this. The quilt looks great so far.

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  3. I hope your brother loves it! It sounds like it has been a lot of fun to work on. :)

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  4. Hahahaha "whatever is normal" that is perfect. Love the quilting on the wolf and the muted background quilting!

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  5. So great! I am a Stark fan so this is awesome :)

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  6. This is looking amazing! Your brother is going to be thrilled. I watched the tutorial; those sketch letter are so cool.

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  7. So cool, Jess. I am not on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, so the references are lost on me, but it looks awesome! I'm glad your brother finally (kind of) caved into letting you create a piece for him :)

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  8. LUCKY brother! As a huge GOT fan, this wall hanging is such a great idea. I love how you've quilted the dire wolf's fur, and if it ravels, so much the better. Your background quilting reminds me of the ice on the Wall at Castle Black--genius! Winter is, indeed, coming :)

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  9. The sneak peeks are stunning! Can barely wait to see the finished project.

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  10. That sketch quilting is new to me. How cool to outline that figure with it? Looking like it had been sketched on there (to state the obvious!). Great idea.

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  11. Great quilting project. Thank you for all the useful hints and tips.

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