Skip to main content

Color Splash DWR - Ring in the new year!

Can you believe it is 2015!  
Time seems to go by so fast!  I started off the new year with a cold! Everyone in my office was sick. I think it started with the guy that insisted on coming in when he had the flu! We listened to him cough and blow his nose for weeks! Ugh!

So what have you been working on this year?  I am still working on my DWR quilt, Color Splash. It is on the quilting frame right now. I think I can finish it this weekend, at least I am hoping I will.
I have double batting in this quilt. The first layer is Bamboo (love!!) and the second is wool.  I wanted the quilting to stand out which is the reason I added the wool.

 It took 30 minutes to quilt each center and there are 9 of them. I am going to revise the quilting pattern so that it stitches faster for any future projects.

 This is a picture of the quilt before I started quilting it.  I am working on the pattern and I should have it available for purchase soon.  Writing instructions is not an easy task!

The first center I quilted didn't turn out well.  I spent 5 hours pulling stitches!!! The design kept stitching over its self and made a mess.  I had to take it back into Art and Stitch and clean it up.  What a pain.  I thought I was done working on it in Art and Stitch when I converted it to use on my longarm, but I guess I really wasn't finished.  I had started working on the quilting design a while back so I forgot where I left off.

I stitched this with Metallic thread which made it even harder to take out!  You can see the problem in the circles and how bad it looked. Only the bottom was really bad so I left the other corners.


Pulling the thread for the two bottom corners is what took 5 hours! I am glad I didn't have to pull the whole thing!


I stitched the Metallic thread in the 4 centers and a different color thread that matched the colors in the quilt in all the other centers.

I am working on all the straight stitching in the arcs right now.  There are 80 arcs in this quilt but it is not taking too long. I am doing them without the aid of the computer because it would take forever to set this up and let the computer stitch it! Computerized quilting is not always the fastest or even mistake free!

It took me a couple of days to do all the stitch in the ditch.  It got easier as a worked my way down the quilt.  I found a rhythm to stitching around the arcs.  I found that using my straight ruler worked the best.  There are still plenty of mistakes with the stitch in the ditch stitching but I am working on improving that skill. 

I have talked to other longarmers that don't do any stitch in the ditch.  I feel it is necessary for the kind of quilting I like to do.  It stabilizes the quilt before I do any custom quilting.  Plus I am a freak because I do a full float on all my quilts!  The stitch in the ditch helps bast the quilt for me.

I love this quilt! I hope I still love it when I am done!


Labels:
Location: Bakersfield, CA 93312, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kern County Fair and Cowboy Quilts! Updated!

The fair is coming to Bakersfield next week.  I thought I would honor the fair by talking about my cowboy boot quilt I made for my sister-in-law last year. I made this quilt before I bought my Handi Quilter longarm.  The quilt was quilted on my Bernina.  I marked the quilt before quilting and also did some free motion quilting on it.  I wish I would of took a picture of the setup I had for the Bernina. I had the sewing machine in our great room on a small fold up table.  We bought a Styrofoam insulation board and cut it up to fit around the sewing machine to make a wide flat surface.  The styrofoam was an inch and a half thick I believe and we doubled it up to bring it to the surface of the sewing machine.  It worked out pretty well.  I still wouldn't go back to it now that I have a longarm. The thing I hated the most about quilting on my Bernina was sandwiching the quilt on the ground.  I am too old for that.... well at least I feel like I am! It sure was a lot of work.  Som
2 comments
Read more

Color Splash DWR (Double Wedding Ring) Quilt is Finished!

The first time I remember ever seeing a Double Wedding Ring quilt was about 20 years ago.   I had finally came to a place in my life where I could afford to get a new bedspread for my bed.  I had never spent the money to buy a bedspread! I was always too poor. When I went to the department store I found this lovely wedding ring quilt! It was on sale but I think I paid almost $200 dollars for it! That was a big purchase for me. That quilt is still in the family, though it was a quilt from the department store I loved it just the same. Last year I started thinking about that quilt. I thought I would like to make a double wedding ring but I didn't want it to have a bunch of flower fabric in it as in the one I bought. I also wanted the rings to be bigger. I am a trained drafter and I have always created my own patterns for all my assorted hobbies! So I went to work drafting rings in the AutoCAD program I use.  I really had no idea how the original wedding ring patterns were create
8 comments
Read more

End of the year catch up!

The year is almost over.   Here are some things I have been working on. I finish my little Christmas Tree Paper Pieced quilt pattern.  My son had filmed a video of me making it that I wanted to post on my website, but he has been distracted and hasn't finished it. If you are interested in the pattern it is located on my website.   Please understand that I wrote the instructions quickly because I meant to also post the video.  If my son completes it I will.   http://www.cluttercreations.com/quilting/quilt-patterns.html I know this is really late in posting this since Christmas is over, but you could always just make it a tree quilt! I also created a small quilt for the turkey hand contest at work.  So I won second place.  I didn't see the first place winner. I just realized that the turkey is missing his eyes in this picture!  They must of came off when I brought it home.  Just picture it with those movable eyes!  I will have to find some more eyes to put on it.
Post a Comment
Read more