Quilting Projects

Saturday, 11 April 2015

Jelly Roll Quilt


Hello quilty friends

I've been keeping myself busy working on a couple of new quilts.
This is the second time I've used a jelly roll and I decided to use a little design I doodled a while back.   First time I used a Bonnie Hunter pattern.

The intention was to use lots of half square triangles - 2 1/2" sounded good to me.





I didn't want to make this too big so it could be a lap quilt or a wall hanging.
Then my favourite part - the quilting.....  

For the first time ever I actually marked the spines by measuring and using a curved ruler so the feathers are quite uniform.   All my work is freehand and I don't have a stitch regulator on my machine.  I would love to be able to do ruler work and that is high up my to-do list.
I used one layer of Warm and Bright wadding.



 Some swirly fill for this bit....

 Freehand feathers in the corner.......

 This part was quite a challenge.  I wanted the feathers to fit into the space......

 Pretty pleased with how they are looking.

 Same again for these feathers, I wanted them to trail around, fitting the space.

 You can see from this photo how I have advanced the frame to work the center section.  I will roll back and finish the sides.  Not sure if this is how you are supposed to do it, but its working for me. I've never had a long arm lesson in my life so everything I do is by trial and error.
 A nice sunny photo..

 Here is the center part finished, still have to get rid of the blue lines.



Some McTavishing is my background fill for this bit and it will have appliqued 3D flowers when done.
At this point my machine decided not to play nicely.  It started skipping stitches when sewing upwards towards the left.  I ran through my checklist several times, new needle, cleaned, oiled, tension check.  I managed to get it working again for all of 5 minutes so I got hubby to take the machine off the frame so I could have a closer look.
Still in free motion mode I did a test sample and it sewed perfectly.  Just cannot figure that out.
Anyway, the machine will be going back on the frame and I hope to get this finished.  It is 3/4 of the way done.  Its been very frustrating.
Here is the sample I stitched:

Wish me luck and I hope to have a finished quilt to show next time.
Happy sewing
Rhianon.