Big Projects

As you can tell, I stick to small projects when I sew.  Since I use my home machine for free motion quilting, it makes quilting my projects easier.  It was quite an undertaking for me to take on a much bigger project.  I decided to make my mother a lap quilt (so bigger than a baby blanket but not as big as a twin quilt) for her birthday.  This is a project I started for her birthday in 2015 only to finish for her birthday in 2016.

The main reason for the delay was not knowing how to handle doing the free motion on my small Singer.  I watched a Craftsy video, Quilting Big Projects on a Small Machine, which gave me some helpful hints; none of which I used for my project.  In fact, I did things explicitly recommended against in the video (such as doing larger patterns).  Part of the problem with following the video is I already had my quilt top assembled and didn't want to have to take it (or cut it) apart to finish it.

I ended up rolling the quilt carefully and just going for it.  Some time (and patience) later, I ended up with this.  I quilted the center floral strips with flowers of varying sizes.  I used a simple round flower, echoing the look of a peony or carnation or the large blooms in the patterns of the fabrics.  I left the border unquilted.

Then I used a decorative stitch on my machine to give some extra reinforcement to the stitching between the quilted strips and the non-quilted border.

Here you can see a bit more of the quilting, which looks like stipple from a distance.

I quilted the top with a variegated purple thread and used a plain purple thread for the bottom.  In the picture below, you can see a bit more of how I did the circular blooms.