Back to that 'magic box' full of projects I've been talking about for several weeks now. The project box is empty, but the one remaining incomplete item that emerged from the box is the quilt - and it needs to be finished to turn the page on the empty box. (At least in my mind.)
You may recall that I combined a handful of leftover somewhat-matching flying geese units and half-square triangle units with some stash fabrics to make nine blocks. The blocks were then assembled into a lap-sized quilt using the Big Day Pattern, originally developed for The FLOCK.
With the quilt top sandwiched and basted, I decided to incorporate straight lines in each block using the width of the presser foot for quilt line placement. However, to keep the lines somewhat parallel I added a couple extra steps before diving in.
I used a ruler and self-erasing pen to mark parallel lines across the block, evenly spaced, about 1-1/2" apart. You can see the purple lines that I drew below.
I started each block with in-the-ditch quilting around the inner perimeter of the block, then stitched on the drawn lines across the block, pivoting 90 degrees to stitch over the perimeter lines to get to the next drawn line without breaking the thread.
Once I stitched all the evenly spaced drawn lines, I doubled back again following the perimeter stitching to add additional lines of stitching between the 1-1/2" marks at varying widths. This way I was able to add fairly straight stitching lines using the edge of the walking foot.
As you see, below, I alternated vertical and horizontal quilting lines in the blocks. One or two more blocks to quilt, then border quilting and binding.
This quilting technique involved a fair amount of turning and squishing, but with the smaller lap-sized quilt, this wasn't much of an issue.
Happy Stitching!
Head Hummingbird
Hummingbird-Highway.com
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