Quilting Progress Video

For my Vlog video this week, I am concentrating on quilting.  I had much to share and thought it made sense to do just one craft per video.  I'll probably do another quilting one soon.  Also I'll do separate videos on papercrafting and from time to time, knitting.  I don't knit that much per day so I typically only complete one project every couple of months.

In the video, I share a quilt top I pieced a few weeks ago after doing a portion of an Improvisational Piecing class on Craftsy. I'd never heard of Improvisational quilting until I was watching one of their series featuring several quilters telling their stories. I love the freedom of this type of piecing.  It is sort of an anything goes approach and you don't have to be super picky about measuring and cutting. When I started I just wanted to use up some of my older fabrics.  For the background the only thing I had enough of was a black and gray fabric.  I added another one and it has created some drama. It is also going to create a little bit of a headache and eyestrain, too.  Quilting on black fabric is akin to knitting black or navy yarn.  It's just harder to see.  I hope it means it is harder to see the imprecision of my free motion quilting, too.  ;-)

A class I bought on Craftsy last fall but only recently watched is Marti Michell's Machine Quilting in Sections.  Marti shares many methods for joining your quilt pieces after they are quilted. I give some of my impressions of these with some sample quilt blocks.  I used Angela Walters Dot to Dot techniques for much of the quilting.

I am planning to use a swirl design on the background of Improv quilt.  My swirls are looking a little better thanks to some YouTube videos by Melanie Ham and Leah Day and the practice I'm doing.  I share in my video how I'm replicating my quilt top on a practice piece so I can get the feel, literally, of how much fabric I can manage on my machine at a time.  This will also help me determine which of Marti's methods I want to use to finish this quilt top which is about 65" square.  That's not so terribly big but for someone new to free motion working in now a much smaller space, it seems huge.

Lastly, (surprise!) I went shopping.  So I have a sneak peek of some fabrics new to my stash. I do have a plan for these and will share that in another video.

Here's the Vlog video on YouTube:


Thanks for watching!