June Free Motion Challenge

Our June Challenge is from Cindy Needham, and oh what a challenge it is! Thank you Cindy for trying to push me out of my comfortable box.

We start off by looking for our “hmmm – purr, the sound our machine makes when we are most comfortable. I am still looking for mine and I think I am almost there, not too fast or too slow.

Cindy had us make a sandwich on which we could practice. You can see I even used a stencil to practice a design I want to use on one of my quilts. I have also drawn a 1 inch grid for future practice, it peeks out there on the right.

Our Challenge for the month is to take all that practice and ‘doodle’ a design. Below is my first attempt.

I have been enjoying the doodles the group on Face Book have posted. One of them, according to the quilter, looks like an octopus. It’s ‘eyes’ seem to be checking you out, enemy or lunch!

Another drew a grid of 1 inch and 1/2 inch and filled all those tiny boxes. Way too detailed and precise for me. I will probably post more attempts for your comments before the final one toward the end of June. In the mean time, have fun quilting.

April’s Challange

For April SewCal Gal had Don Linn for the challenge. Don taught us how to transfer designs to fabrics using tule. I knew I had some tule somewhere in my sewing room so, after digging around for awhile, I pulled it out and remembered I had seen Don demonstrate this some time back but never tried it.

 

I reduced my photo copy image by 20% but it was still a little bigger then I wanted so I made 65% the size of the original. I couldn’t find the grey sharpie so got a light blue, yellow and a darker grey. None of them showed up on the black tule but the grey did show up on the candlelight tule.

I pinned the tule pattern to my fabric and used the Clover white pen to make the transfer.

 

I used Superior Thread’s Master Piece #150 (light lavender) on top, #182 (ash blond) in the bobbin with a #12 topstitch needle.

Here is the finished block: front

And back:

the tule transfer works well and I will be using the method again.

In sewing the design I found if I went really slow I could stay on the lines accurately. It took a lot of patience on my part but I did it! I loved putting the pebbles in the center of the flower and noticed my stipple changed size according to my desire to finish. If I ever use the stipple as an all over design I will really have to concentrate to keep it consistent.

Thanks to Don Linn and SewCal Gal for once again giving us a quality Challenge.