So I went in and dove head first into the June challenge. It was by Cindy Needham and contained a LOT of information. She does amazing quilting and I think I will come back to some of the stuff she talked about. However, for me personally, it was too much text and to many areas covered in the same tutorial for me to feel 100% about it. Please don't get me wrong, I LOVE to read and I love to learn new things, it's just that when I read a tutorial, I want it to explain what I need to know fairly straight to the point, and this felt a bit too open ended.
It was also quite hard for me to do as I'm no fan of the Zentangle thing that's so popular right now, to much crazy going on, no organization and no order... But I really want to embrace each and every challenge so I tried to go at it with an open mind.
I really don't like the outcome (too much stuff going on) but I do like the idea of solving the issue of to much blank space by sub dividing it. Plus it was really fun to do so much tiny quilting and so many different things at once. And it was also really good for me I think to have to do something that was completely out of my comfort zone when it came to design. =)
I'll be honest with you and admit that I skipped the sketching part again. I have too precious little time in front of the machine as it is and I didn't want to waste any of it that could be spent with thread and needle on pen and paper. I've spent a lot of my time growing up doodling so I thought I had most of the element's she mentioned pretty much embedded in my muscle memory anyway.
It was also fun to learn that I was already doing with microstitches to the stop and going when quilting was the longarm quilter way. I had no idea ^^
I'm really enjoying this challenge, I just wish I had a lot more time to practice!
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On the topic of quilting, I thought I'd also show you some of my quilting test blocks for my Periodic Table Quilt. Please excuse the sloppy look of the quilting, it's just test blocks and I just wanted to see the effects. Here you can also see a few of all the incorrect elements I had to replace. In a way it was good as I did about 6 of these test blocks of 4 until I had decided on what I wanted to do.
My original idea was to outline the letters to get them to pop, a good idea in theory, not so much in reality. And then I tried a ton of different versions before I decided on the outlined block instead of letters and then a simple all over stipple to not distract from the lettering and be sure I got the same density of quilting all over.
Very nice job on the FMQ....
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