Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Free Motion Mavericks and funky square flowers

Welcome to my second week of hosting the Free Motion Mavericks link-up. Muv, who is located across the pond, and I are taking turns organising the party!😊

Free Motion Mavericks (Week 214)

On my last post of Free Motion Mavericks, I shared my attempts at creating our logo with my own free motion quilting (FMQ) writing. A few readers were surprised to find out that it was possible to write using FMQ, so I thought that I would share some writing from my piece, A White History of Art. It's much easier to write in FMQ when the thread blends with the fabric!
Writing with FMQ: WHITE, austere and Elite

Funky Square Flower

For this week's post, I decided to learn to FMQ the Square Flower in Lori Kennedy's Free-Motion Machine Quilting 1-2-3.

Start by drawing the design - in this case, the Square Flower

As always, the first thing I did was to practice drawing it. This was one of the pretty pages - the rest of my practicing was on scraps of paper!

I often practicing FMQ the design on a fabric sandwich that I've made for this purpose. However, this time I practiced directly on a wheelchair quilt that I made years ago for my grandmother. Since I made it before I learned to FMQ, there is a lot of negative space to practice in 😊.
Chevy can't resist a quilt on the floor

It was difficult practicing on the light fabric since I could barely see the white thread. It did come out on the darker fabrics.

Funky Square Flowers

More Square Flowers designed by Lori Kennedy
The flowers showed up surprisingly well on the back of the quilt

Flowers on the back of the quilt
I quilted the Square Flowers on each half of the sets of two strips. You can see that I'll be able to keep practicing on this quilt for a while.

A row of Square Flowers
What I learned
  • I really like the funky look of these square flowers. They are so much fun, and can be made with the centre in the middle of the space, or at one side for a lopsided flower.
  • Having something sandwiched and ready to practice FMQ makes my practice much less of a bother.
Related links
Linking parties
I'll be linking up to these great linky parties. Let's go see what the fuss is about! Tuesday Colour Linky Party, Midweek Makers, Silly Mama Quilts WIPsNeedle & Thread Thursday, Finished or Not Friday, Friday Foto Fun, Can I Get A Whoop Whoop?,

A big thank you to Anja for linking up her Freefall Finish when I sent her a plea by email. A party with no guests is just too sad! Check out her lovely quilt!
We don't want a sad party here, so please link up....your project doesn't even have to include free motion quilting!

Inlinkz Link Party

12 comments:

  1. Great job on the free motion work!

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    1. Thanks Susan. I hope you'll join us some time :-)

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  2. Hi Andree! These square flowers look cool! It would be great in a charm pack square to fill it up with something interesting. I'm going to PIN this so I can remember it next time I have a good application for it. Hmm, maybe for a border too although maybe on a smaller scale. I would definitely need to get my acrylic board out to test it first!! Thanks for the great idea. ~smile~ Roseanne P.S. Nothing to share this week but maybe next with any luck!

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    1. Thanks for visiting Roseanne. I really like this square flower and am using the design for a project in an upcoming blog hop (Dust off a Quilt Book). It's very cool!

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  3. These flowers look great. They really add an extra dimension of interest to the quilt :)

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    1. Thanks Janine. They look great and best of all, they were fairly easy to learn. That's a double winner in my book!

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  4. I really like your square flowers, especially the veining you added.

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    1. Thanks Marti, they were a lot of fun to quilt, especially the vein!

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  5. Great job on your FMQ.... I am usually to impatient to practice on paper... a trait I also often regret. I do a fair bit of FMQ, I will try to remember to come to your next party before it closes - I need to update my party list and get back to linking more regularly.

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    1. Thanks Dione, I know how busy you are! I just love to practice on paper during meetings or anytime when I want to concentrate on just one thing - it's almost meditative :-)

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  6. I really like those funky flowers as well. I'll have to keep them in mind for future quilting projects.

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    1. Hi Shasta, I hope you'll use them - they are great fun to quilt.

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