I always want to have projects to look forward to and it seems as soon as I'm close to finishing a quilt, I'm already thinking about the next one. I don't believe I am alone in that mindset. The Fons & Porter Love of Quilting ladies have said many times that quilters are actually impatient people who want to get our creations finished so we can start the next!
There is inspiration everywhere and while watching the movie "Me Before You" I was captivated by the beautiful English paper pieced hexi quilt on Louisa's bed. Of course, I want to duplicate that quilt and I'm already on the way since I discovered English paper piecing last summer and got all the gear to go with it. You can see it all in THIS POST. Even though I've put together quite a few hexagon flowers, I didn't have a goal in mind and it was really a keep busy, portable project for quiet times. Now that I'm inspired and motivated by the pretty flowers on the movie set quilt, I have something to work towards. I can't use the pieces I've joined already because they were just stitched with no set colour scheme. Lou's quilt is made of hexi flowers with different prints but each is fabric is part of the same colour family. I'll have to do some planning and then work through my scrap bins.
While digging around in one of those scrap buckets I found this sample piece. Isn't if funny how time softens our opinions and self-critique. I couldn't believe how good my little test swatch looked and the flowers stitched with hyper-quilting are quite pretty! I think I might even trim this up and find a use for it...and at the very least use it for inspiration when I do some stitching with fancy threads on something else. I don't know why I would have tossed it in the scrap bucket.
I did a couple of other test strips to see how I liked the look of sparkly thread 'stars' (which kind of look like snowflakes). Thinking perhaps this design would suit the circle quilt (which I envision as planets) and represent stars in the galaxy, I took some time to outfit my Janome 1600P for free-motion quilting. I loaded up the embroidery thread (which I have used once before on the 'Frozen' quilt) and tried it out. While it's very pretty, I'm not sure they look enough like stars and working them around the circles of the quilt would be challenging. I only have the one spool of thread and it's quite delicate and temperamental with free-motion. It was a worthwhile exercise because now I know it's not what I'm looking for. I probably saved myself lots of un-sewing had I just started work on the actual quilt.
Comments