Wild Olive

It's been a crazy busy month, so I was grateful that Judy selected an easier (read "smaller") one for me this time - #4! Someone at my quilt group had originally started this one. I made some more blocks to make it big enough, and this month I quilted it! I used freehand butterflies out of the book "Laura's Little Book of Machine Quilting Designs ." I've really enjoyed this book for giving me ideas for quilting... I get so stumped on that sometimes! Here's a close up of the idea... the butterflies have echoed wings, and most have antennas. I can see that I still need to work on my spacing when I'm going freeform, but it was pretty good. I was trying to use fabric that was in the "Baby Quilt Bin" from our group and of course, ended up with a pieced back! It'll help the baby learn more colors, right? :-) Four for four! A miracle for me! But moving on my UFO's has helped because 'an object in motion tends to stay i...

Getting There! , a photo by theercs on Flickr. The quilting is done on this little baby quilt. I started out thinking I was going to just do the "lazy baby stitch." It's the loose zig zag that I've done on several baby quilts - fast and easy! However, because of the angles and rectangle shape of these blocks, I couldn't picture it looking very good in the end. If I did it from corner it just added too many more "angley" lines. If I just did it on the horizontal and vertical lines where the blocks line up... kinda boring, and I'm not sure it would be enough quilting. So back to free motion it went, which went pretty well. I kind of liked the "enhanced" butterfly design - adding a second echo around his wings and adding antennae most of the time (although I see a few in the pic that don't have them) added a little pizzaz to the butterfly. I'll post again when it's completed... just trimming and binding to go! Yeah! Betsy