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Silk Scraps and my First Attempt at Free Motion Quilting

With so much going on lately, I have felt really scattered and unfocused. I haven't had much time left at the end of the day to do anything creative but just today, I managed to finish an art quilt that I have been working on for a while. You might recognize this first picture from this post back in March.


I started with fusible interfacing and some silk and cotton scraps from various other projects, and began creating a background by just playing around with the overall layout. Once I was satisfied, I filled in the holes with more scraps in a contrasting color and then ironed the pieces to the interfacing to hold everything together.


In this process, I was careful to maintain the frayed edges of my fabric scraps in order to keep them as part of the composition. Next I began experimenting with free motion quilting technique, using an orange thread to contrast the fabric pieces.


This was my first attempt at free motion quilting ever! I like the end result but I had some issues in the execution. My Janome is still at the sewing machine doctor so I'm using the Kenmore machine that I purchased off of Craigslist for $20. I love the machine itself. It has some great stitching options that my Janome does not have, but when I lower the feed dogs, they don't stay completely lowered as I sew. After a minute or two of free motion sewing, they pop back up enough to interfere. At some point, I think I will try this to cover the feed dogs, but for the sake of this project, I powered through until I was satisfied with what I had done.


Here's a detailed shot of my free motion motif (above and below). I really had no plans when I started the free motion sewing. I just let it become a flower as it developed.


Next, I added the quilt batting and a backing, and created straight rows of stitching in a different color of thread, being careful not to sew within the other areas created by the orange stitching.


I liked the different elements of this piece once the sewing was done but I didn't like them all together. All of the straight stitching that I added confused the focus of the piece and the flower ended up visually lost. A tad bit frustrated by this, I had to step away for a while to figure out what I could add to bring the focus back to the flower.


Finally after a couple of weeks of examining and contemplating, this is what I came up with (below). The beads were added by hand. The butterflies are metal scrapbooking embellishments from Graphic 45, also added by hand. And I added Iridescent Orange Shiva Paintstik to enhance the flower and flower pot even more.

The edging on this piece is some quilting fabric that I had left over from a previous project. This is the first time I have edged a quilt with something other than bias tape, and I am quite pleased with the effect. I think in this case, it definitely adds some visual contrast to the hand-dyed silk fabrics.


And here's a close up of the final product.


It took some time to get there but I think this experiment was a success and I'm definitely happy with the result.

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