Thursday, August 15, 2019

Only 115 blocks left on Free Motion Mavericks

Welcome to Free Motion Mavericks link up (Week 242).

Only 115 blocks left to FMQ

Batik king-sized bed quilt
I don't think that you've seen this beauty since 2016! In July of that year, I only had 146 blocks left to quilt out of 169 (13 x 13).

I haven't posted about this project since then but I have photos from April 2018 of a few blocks that I FMQ at the time.

This is the king-sized quilt.

I counted the quilted blocks - from the back of the quilt, since that was much easier! That's when I learned that between last April and last night, I must have quilted 31 blocks. Yeah!

Here are some pretty blocks from April 2018.

FMQ flowers

Lovely ferns (or sea weeds)
Now for last night's blocks.

Curves and lots of echoing

Big and little boxes
What I learned
  • I probably shouldn't have FMQ last night - I was really tired. Some of the blocks were fine but a few were not very good. It's probably a good thing that these blocks are on the edge of the quilt. Let's face it, out of 169, a few are allowed to not be great. 
  • I've been FMQ a lot since 2016 and 2018 but FMQ a king-sized bed is really not the same. No matter where you are quilting and how careful you are, because of the size, there is a lot of drag. It took me about 3 blocks before I got in the groove - that's 2 blocks more than usual on anything else!
  • I'm going to keep at this quilt since I've noticed that one of the fabrics, in blocks that were not FMQ, is starting to tear. That particular fabric, in one of the middle blocks, has ripped and will need to be replaced. I'll show you how I'll be doing this in a later post. 
  • I originally stitched-in-the-ditch around each block, but since there are 5 pieces of fabric in each block, I should probably have stitched each seam. In my defense, I didn't expect it to take so long 😲
  • A few blocks were minimally quilted but I added them into the not-quilted count. As a learning exercise, waiting 3 years has taught me that these big blocks need to be FMQ all over, even if not densely. 
Related links
Linking parties
I will be linking up to these great linky parties. Let's check them out! Tuesday Colour Linky Party, Midweek Makers, Needle & Thread Thursday, Finished or Not Friday, Friday Foto Fun, Can I Get A Whoop Whoop?, Main Crush Monday, What I Made Monday, Moving It Forward, Design Wall Monday, Monday Making,

Free Motion Mavericks Link Up

Thank you for linking up last time. I hope that you are all enjoying the summer and getting a little bit of time to play with your free motion quilting!

Have you been following Dione, aka the Clever Chameleon's Love with a Twist free BOM? It's all about balloon animals and Dione's patterns are so cute. Make sure to check out her giraffes as well as her other blocks😊


You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!
Click here to enter

12 comments:

  1. I've made a couple of king sized quilts and I found straight line quilting with a walking foot enough of a challenge. I don't how you can do this. Your fmq looks great and this is going to be spectacular :)

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    1. Thank you so much Janine. Let's just say that this would be why it's taken so long. I didn't think that it would make a difference if I quilted them later, but three years might have been too long to wait :-) ps. I'm not planning on making any more king-sized quilts...just one for our bed!

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  2. Your quilt is lovely and inspiring. Your quilting is lovely, seriously lovely. Thank you so much for sharing!

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    1. Hi Miaismine, thanks so much. I haven't touched it since the post but I do want to work on it during my holidays...hopefully soon!

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  3. You're going to have a lovely quilt with all the interesting quilting designs!

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    1. Thanks Susan. There sure are a lot of blocks to practice different designs - and they don't show up that much so organic quilting is allowed :-)

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  4. Wow!!! This is a WOW quilt, with all that FMQ variety!!! Amazing!

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    1. Thank you so much Nancy. I really hope to get back to it soon. So many blocks....

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  5. Wow! It is going to be an amazing quilt. Your FMQ is so beautiful :)

    -Soma

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    1. Thanks Soma. It feels like a quilt that may never end :-)

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  6. You are right - FMQ of a king-size project is hard, no matter how practised you are. Builds muscles! I keep meaning to look into an overhead hanging system to support the quilt weight to counter some of this. Thanks for the feature. xx

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    1. Hi Dione - yes that's exactly it. I haven't been back at it since I had my felting miss-adventure. I don't think that my back and shoulders can handle it quite yet.

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