Friday, August 24, 2007

Shapes?

I'm using this I-Spy to practice my free motion quilting. Surprisingly, the hardest shapes are the simple ones. If you look too closely, you'll see that my square contains no 'straight' lines, and my circle is wonky indeed!





I used a cookie cutter to trace the heart shape... that's actually a bit easier than other shapes because the lines don't have to be exactly straight, and asymmetry isn't as noticeable.




The spiral was fun to try, if not spectacularly executed.



It's coming together slowly but surely. I'm a bit concerned about how I'm going to do the squares towards the middle of the quilt, I need to really be able to maneuver the fabric and it's hard to do that if there's a whole bunch of it crammed up against the neck of the machine... and it's also hard to do if half the weight of the quilt is hanging off the side of the table.


So far I've managed to quilt close approximations of the following shapes:
squares
circles
triangles
stars
rectangles
hearts
a maple leaf.

I've also done some squiggles and zig-zags. Can you suggest any other shapes for me to use? I've got like 30 squares to fill, and I don't want to do too many repeats.

5 comments:

Sue, aka seiding said...

I would have loved a quilt like that when I was a kid! Heck, I'd love it now!

For shapes, how about using some shapes that are found in the patterned materials? You could do ducks, or flowers, or even a dragonfly. Or are those too complicated?

Michael5000 said...

Brainstorm: You can do every pattern twice for a built-in matching game. Stars can be 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 pointed. Spirals in both directions. Clubs and spades? Letters and numbers? Octogons! Interlocked ovals. Concentric circles. Musical notes. Simple flowers. OK, I'm done. : )

Batty said...

It's such a beautiful quilt. Your work is lovely, I like it. Keep it up!

Zonda said...

Great ideas above! Looking good so far! :)

Libby said...

Your quilting looks great so far - I'm awed by the attempt itself. If you have any other cookie cutters you haven't used yet, why not give 'em a try. Also and hand, and an apple both occurred to me while I was reading.