Preparing to quilt the quilt

I usually spend part of my drive home on Friday evening thinking about the topic for Monday’s blog. What will I talk about? Do I need to take photos? Do I need to sew anything? This Friday was no exception. I had the quilt top, back and batting for my current project in the trunk of my car. I wanted to get my quilt pinned and ready to quilt this week.

The quilt back taped in place

I have a pretty nice set-up in my basement for pinning quilts. I have two banquet-size folding tables side by side which give me lots of room. So when I can, I take my quilts home on the weekend to baste. If you’d like more detail about how I baste see my blog post Basting Away.

I pin basted the quilt, folded it and brought it back to my apartment. I didn’t remember to take a photo of the quilt after I’d finished basting, but here is the quilt top so you can picture what I am talking about.

The quilt top

I spent quite a while on my drive back to my apartment thinking about how I’d quilt it.  I decided to stitch in the ditch for the colored blocks but those big ivory squares deserve something special.

I’m using cotton batting. I love how flat it is and I love that it shrinks just a bit when I wash my quilt so the quilt has some texture. According to the package, my quilting can be as much as 10” apart but that wouldn’t take advantage of the big ivory squares. Different types of batting and even different brands of batting have different requirements for how far apart the quilting can be, so be sure to read the package.

I could use my embroidery machine to quilt in those areas but they are large (14” square) so I’d have to do multiple hoopings. I don’t want to do multiple hoopings within one block when I’m quilting/embroidering through all three quilt layers. It feels like I’d just be asking for puckers on the back.

The next choice is free-motion and I want something fancy. So this morning when I got to work, I went immediately to find this stencil. It is called McScrollwork© by Karen McTavish.

McScrollwork

I need a quick and easy way to transfer the design to my quilt. I know from personal experience that I don’t want to use copies from the photocopy machine. The toner can become a permanent part of your project. So after picking the brains of the rest of the quilters on the QN team, here’s what we’ve come up with. I’m going to trace one copy using a permanent marker. I’ll stack several layers of freezer paper and stitch with no thread and a size 100/16 needle to mark the freezer paper. Then I can iron the freezer paper onto my quilt and quilt through the freezer paper.  Do any of you have any other thoughts? I would welcome your ideas. I can hardly wait until time to go home so I can give it a try.

The episode this week on Quilters Newsletter TV: the Quilter’s Community features quilt artist Linda Beach and is really interesting. Be sure to check it out.

We are getting oh-so-close to our goal of 15,000 likes on FaceBook, and when we reach that goal, there will be a super giveaway, so make sure you and your friends “like us!”

And don’t miss Best Fat Quarter Quilts giveaways. There’s one each day this week.

Happy quilting!

It’s Tuesday morning now and I did quilt one block last night. As far as a method to make multiple patterns and mark the quilt, the freezer paper worked fine. However, I feel like the time I saved in making multiple patterns, I spent removing the freezer paper after I’d stitched. So before you try it on your quilt, stitch a sample block.

Tonight, I’m going to mark one block with my blue pounce. My concern with that technique is whether or not I can get all the blue powder removed from my ivory quilt block. I’ll let you know.