Practice, practice .......

I am looking forward to the beautiful things everybody made this week.
This week I decided to practice a lot. I started a few months ago to practice with Leah's Day  free motion quilting project and Leah's Guilt Along. I learned a lot and quilted my first quilts. I am now addicted to free motion quilting, I want to make beautiful quilted whole clothes and trapunto quilts, but need a lot of free motion practice before I start.  I quilt Leah's new patterns for practice, but I do not want to quilt along with Express Your Love or other quilts. So I was glad I found the SewCalGal 2013 free motion challenge. I started with the five challenges and finished them. But on the SewCalGal website is more to learn: there are more challenges: the challenges of SewCalGal 2012 free motion challenge.
All challenges have a tutorial of an expert quilters and all the experts invite you to try new patterns and techniques. There is even a tutorial form Leah! The assignments are so fun to do. So I decided this week to free motion quilt a lot and do as many as tutorials as possible.

I bought a lot of dark and light purple cotton. (6 yard,width 97 inch) Cotton with a shine! I sandwiched a 28 inch square sandwich for a tiles design (Tutorial Angela Waters). In every tile another assignment. Just like Leah, I like to wake up early, so I can quilt before my husband awake. So I practice every day. I finished the tile sampler Thursday afternoon, just before dinner.

I used a too thick polyester batting for the 'trapunto effect' but the quilt was stiff and sometimes difficult to handle. Had to find another batting.

I will cut the quilt in pieces for postcards and place mats.

 I love micro quilting. Stitching so slow that you can almost count the stitches, so I like the July and October challenges:

October challenge, tutorial Teri Lucas (8 inch square)

July challenge: Cindy Needham  (8x11 inch) It is a bit Zentangle quilting!

A fun challenge is the August Bonus tutorial by Susan Brubaker Knapp: take a picture and quilt the Pattern. I used this picture

And this is a first try in the last tile of the quilt.

Next time I will use more colors!
I will use more pictures to quilt postcards and mini quilts. So fun!


The April tutorial of Don Linn: transferring a pattern with tulle. I used this method  for the September challenge of Paula Reid.
The transfer of the pattern with the tulle, was not a success. The chalk lines  disappear, so I need to finished with drawing three corners without pattern. I used too thick polyester batting, so it was not possible to lay the tulle on the sandwich beck again. The lines did not fit anymore.
I was out of tulle, so I used this fabric which I found in my stash.

                                                                                                                                                                    

I printed Donś pattern and pinned the paper on Sandwich and sewed on the lines. As you can see it is difficult to remove all the paper.

Some challenges were just new patterns:

November challenge: Sarah Vedeler: Swirls

Januari challenge: Frances Moore

Januari challenge: Frances Moore

May Challenge: Leah Day:

August challenge: tutorial  Wendy Sheppard. Nice tutorial with a easy to quilt and beautiful filler:jester hat.

                      

 The March Challenge of Anne Vahl: more fillers:

It is so nice of you for stopping by, I love to hear from everyone of you, so please feel free to leave a comment. Unfortunately I decided to exclude 'anonymous' comments, my blog gets attacked by so many spam and bots that I've decided to change that setting.

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If you need to reach me feel free to e-mail me at maartjequilt@gmail.com

Thanks so much for reading
Maartje Quilt
Amsterdam