A Little Quilting

After I left last spring, the art quilt group down here spent a meeting painting mugs at a local shop (which has now closed).  They challenged themselves to exchange those mugs and then make "mug rugs" for the mug they got.  They then wrapped them all and I passed around the mugs with their rugs to the new owners.  It was a really funn lunch and great mugs and rugs!!

I have been very busy finishing up the five quilts that Dianne helped me baste.  A couple of these quilt were short batting so first step was to sew strips of batting to edges where they were short.  Then the heavy duty work began.  I don't have a nice table down here like at home but jerry-rigged several tables around the sewing machine which help somewhat.  This is the "quilt from hell" which turned out to be pretty easy to free hand quilt!!  I just chose to free hand around each of the blue motifs and then do stitching within the hexagon.  I tried several different things in the beige areas but didn't like any of them so undid them and left them blank.  I am sewing on the purple binding now!

You can see the detail of the quilting here.  One corner of the quilt is a bit wobbly but we will declare that to be the lower left corner of the quilt!  No way am undoing it!  There was a lot of rippling in the top before quilting but that is all calmed down now.

 I am working on this stack and whack now.  It is going fairly well but best viewed from a trotting horse!  Haven't decided whether I am going to do some fussy quilting in the wider white area in the border and sashing.  

Have gotten quite a bit done.  I am doing the free motion stuff now which I much prefer especially when you have limited area as you don't have to do as much movement.  After I get this one done, I will only have one more to do.  I still have to get batting for the "mystery quilt" but did find some backing for it and then to get it basted.  I have pretty much decided what kind of quilting I am going to do as I  did a lot of staring at it when it was pinned on my design wall.  

My quilting process is to do the straight line quilting in the ditch to secure the three layers.  Then I go in with thread matching the motifs and free hand quilt within each of the motifs.  Unless you look really closely, you can't see the quilting as I may have three different colors of thread within a motif.!

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