Sunday 8 January 2012

First

Apparently I need a blog to participate in the free motion quilting project quilt along - so here it is. I'm Toni, and I am a school teacher in New Zealand. I teach science, and have two sons. I do ballet, run, take singing lessons, garden and try to keep up with the kids. I have 2 west highland white terriers, and a siamese cat. There are also goldfish (MANY) and a turtle living with me.

Sometimes, I'm a little busy.

BUT onto the reason why I started this blog - free motion quilting with Leah. Our assignment was wiggling. Here is the wiggling:


I started on the right - the stippling is the last bit.

As you can see the stippling was going good till I got to a funky bit top left. Its the first time I had tried quilting such a tiny little sandwich. And I still lost concentration!!!

This is from underneath - the tension is wrong!



The bobbin is too tight - this was done with the feed dogs still up, and stitch length set to zero. It is a LOT better than with the feed dogs down, so I will continue to experiment with this. Obviously I still need to play with the tension dial, but not so much. First useful clue! 

Just for information, I am using a Janome MemoryCraft 4000.

Leah talked about writing on a quilt - one of my first quilts had writing on it. It was for Son #1, and I quilted his name down the sides of the quilt - here is a wee section of it:


I wanted to make the quilt unmistakably his - this succeeded!


5 comments:

  1. Wonderful Toni! Welcome to blogging - it's a great way to share and process ideas and build a community. Looking at your stippling sample, your tension doesn't look too bad to me. Just try speeding up your machine a bit when you make those deep U shape curves.

    See you next week!

    Leah Day

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  2. Hi Toni you have done so well with you FMQ, I think you will have no worries at all.

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  3. Good job on your practice piece and have fun blogging!

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  4. The cutest thing I heard someone say, and it stuck in my head, was to stipple the outline of Bullwinkle's antlers. So I keep finding myself doing just that.
    I think it looks great.
    Kathi from Texas

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  5. Wow, Toni, I think your practice piece looks terrific! You could put some red binding around your square and voila! a new potholder. I agree with Leah, I think your tension at the bottom looks pretty good. Very clever of you to write your son's name on his quilt made with love by mum. Keep at it!

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