July Free-Motion Quilting Challenge

This month’s Free-Motion Quilting Challenge was issued by Angela Waters. I was not familiar with her work. She looks fairly young, and she quilts professionally for others.

She taught a technique she calls “Tiles.” She had us divide up the space bit by bit and then we quilted within each space. She used just one filler. I decided to mix it up a bit and do a different fill in each space.

At first, I thought I would use a special ruler that I just got to keep the edges of my tiles nice and straight. Wouldn’t that have been impressive? Well, I couldn’t get the proper presser foot to fit my machine, and a regular presser foot just slides under the ruler. Oh, well! It’s good to practice trying to stitch straight lines, right? They ended up somewhat wonky, but I’m satisfied enough to call it good.

It think the other thing that would have been a benefit to the overall design is if the space between the horizontal and vertical lines was significantly different that the spaces between the fill lines. For instance, the horizontal and vertical lines are about 1/2″ apart. It probably would have looked better if I had kept the fill lines 1/4″ apart or less. Then the divisions would have stood out more. Good thing to remember for future quilts that really matter.

I’m beginning to think that variety is probably one of the most important design elements. It makes things so much more interesting.

BTW, notice my “improvement”? I finally did not wait until the last minute! I’m not saying it will ever happen again, but at least it happened once 🙂