I CAN QUILT!!!

As an attempt to "lighten" my stress levels, I decided to try my hand at, what I call, traditional quilting. Now, I've made quilts before, but when it actually came time to "quilt" (the locking of all three layers with stitching) I always fell back to the old standards of a) "stitch-in-the-ditch" which is just sewing a straight line around the block design; and b) "straight line" quilting, which is essentially stitching straight lines down the entire quilt in equal intervals to make squares or diamonds.

This time, I took some green and gold fabric and made the traditional block called the "windmill" block. I used a complimentary striped fabric for the sashing between the blocks. After constructing the quilt top, I prepared to freemotion quilt. This means that you drop the feed dogs on your sewing machine, step on the foot pedal and move the fabric with your hands, guiding the thread in a design by using the needle as a "stationary pen". It takes practice and I'll be the first to admit that my stitches are not even -- some got very tiny and some REALLY long. But I had a great time and am really pleased with the outcome!

Here is a photo of the finished quilt.

As you can see, the corner blocks were quilted in a spiral design. The North / South / East / West blocks were quilted with a flowing wind swirling design and the center block was my old standard "stitch-in-the-ditch".

Believe me, after all is said and done, this really helped my stress levels as well as giving me a wonderful sense of accomplishment!