The Seven Days of New Years 2021 - Day 4: Quilting Has Commenced!

Before going to bed last night, I laid out the next "Snowflakes" block:

I had to make a few extra of the textured medium blue hexies since I had changed the color placement in the patterned layout a bit.  Wanting to get started on the quilting, I decided to save the "sit and stitch" on it for this evening's Accuquilt Live event and I'll work on it then. They will be viewing quilts from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts both tonight and tomorrow night.  

I'll update this post with the actual video links once they air since the videos live on You Tube and Facebook for good.  Actually if you like quilt museum visits, you can also check out the ones they made at the International Quilt Study Center back in July and September.

Today's focus project was quilting the "Serendipity" quilt.  It took me a while to review all of Angela Walter's Feather FMQ Challenge videos again and make some decisions about what to quilt where.  One thing I had decided last week was that I wanted to use Angela's "Custom Feather" (seen in this video) to quilt along all the vertical seams that run the length of the quilt.  

It is the one motif that doesn't work from a pre-stitched center stem and she used it to quilt along block seams.  The twist for me is that I'd need to watch how the feathers transition from one rectangle to another since I'll need to change the thread color then.  I also decided to take her advice and mark the outer line that the feathers needed to meet to help keep the stitching even (I'm using 1-1/2" away from the seam as my guideline).

I started in the middle of the quilt with the blue rectangle and once the feathers were stitched on that side, I decided to continue with the same thread and stitch the feathers in the center of that rectangle. I really debated for a while about what to use here as on close inspection of the print I used, it actually has a sort of feathery/frondy motif in it already.  I decided to use those as a guide to stitch along.  Initially, I sketched out on preview paper Angela's "Basic Feather", then thought her "Curly Feather" would look better.  However, I have a few other books on stitching Feathers that I decided to consult and found another option that I liked even more.

Patsy Thompson's book "Feather Adventures" always intrigued me with her technique of layering colors when stitching feathers to make them pop.  I won't be going that far this time but I did find a feather motif that when sketched out on preview paper, really picked up the underlying motifs on the print so I went with that.

Oops!  While I marked the right side of the rectangle for the seam feathers, I forgot to mark the left side before stitching the feathers in the center!  Not a big deal, fortunately I realized it before I had stitched the rest of the rectangle.  I just fill stitched by the seam around those bottom two and resumed the feathers along the seam further up the rectangle.  

It's a little hard to get a good shot of it at this hour but it all stitched out pretty good!  Needless to say, I know I was pretty tense because I was starting off so, I'll break from this for tonight.  I am pleased with the good start and hopefully tomorrow, I can continue and get a good deal further now that I've warmed up!   

Now back to the hexies for the rest of the evening!