Once I wrapped up the Swirl placemat I worked on for a few weeks, using the Creative Grids Mini Pineapple Trimmer and my Swirl pattern notes, I kinda got on a yank to finish up the pineapple quilt I started a few years back.
I'm a really big fan of blues and browns together, so this was a really fun quilt top to make. The color scheme was inspired by some moose-y fabric from Alaska used for the border and backing.
The quilt top has been all done for at least a year or two, and I even prepared a pieced backing to use up every thread of that moose fabric.
I taped the backing to the finished basement workroom floor, then layered on fluffy wool batting, then the quilt top.
I prefer to pin-baste, so I grabbed my pins and got to work.
I use the pin-basting time to consider how I'm going to approach the quilting. If you've been following me for a while, then you know I quilt my own quilts on my domestic machine. So that means, I need a quilt strategy.
For most quilts, I typically start with some walking-foot straight-line quilting, then fill in the spaces with free motion or more straight lines.
For this quilt, I decided to stitch down the center of each sashing strip. I also decided to quilt in-the-ditch around the diamond-shaped cornerstones, instead of quilting through them.
Normally, I'd probably quilt top-to-bottom, then side to side within the sashing rows, east-west, and north-south. But those diamonds create a bit of an issue.
If I quilt east-west first, then ditch the bottom two sides of each diamond corner stone, then my north-south line would duplicate one side of the diamond and completely miss another of the diamond sides.
I decided to follow a diagonal path to stitch through the center of the sash, then ditch around the diamonds. As you can see below, my quilting path gets longer as I progressed from the corner, inward, from 1 to 2 to 3, and so on.
I'm always trying to find the best quilt path with the least amount of starts and stops. I'm not sure I found the right path - there are still a lot of starts and stops here, but I do think this way will avoid missed stitching.
And it's fun to see the progress from the corner inward.
The colored arrows below show my quilt plan from red, to green, to turquoise, and then to purple arrows.
It's definitely tedious, and progress is slow. But I like the effect so far.
To keep the lines straight between diamond corners, I'm marking the quilting line point to point with a 6-1/2" ruler (the blocks finish to 6") and an air erasable marking pen. The ink disappears pretty quickly, so I can't get too far ahead of myself.
Once I complete the quilting lines in the sashing and around the diamonds, I'm going to go back and quilt more in and around the blocks.
I'm gonna be at this a while. . . .
Happy Stitching!
Joan Ford
Head Hummingbird
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