A few weeks ago, I said that I wanted to finish those four quilts before I speak to my guild in September. The College Fjord quilt is done. The Acadia sunrise quilt is now almost done as well. Let’s take a look at what I’ve done.
There were two questions remaining on that quilt – the border and the quilting. I took a bit of a coward’s way out with the border. It needed something – I could have just done a solid black border, but it just didn’t feel right, and it didn’t look right in my head. I took a friend’s suggestion and simply pretended I was putting a mat around an image in a frame, so I ended up adding a simple cream colored solid border around it. It literally looks like an image, matted and framed to go on a wall.
The quilting was a different story. At a local quilt store I was visiting to source fabrics for the Gimsøy church fabrics, I found two templates that would normally be used with chalk to mark quilting lines. I used one of the templates for the land in the image, and I used the other template as inspiration for the sky, and I drew in the quilting for the water based on how I’d seen others quilt water. I’m rather pleased with the result.
Honestly, this is the first time I’ve really done a significant amount of free motion quilting. Up until a couple of years ago, I had a sewing machine whose feed dogs couldn’t be lowered, so I couldn’t use it to do any free motion quilting, and I’ve just not had a reason to do it yet with my “new” machine (it’s nearly three years old). I’m pretty sure this is the first time that the idea of free motion quilting didn’t scare my socks off. I think having the pattern drawn on the fabric beforehand helped. I didn’t have to think about the pattern – I just had to follow the line. It’s certainly not perfect, but given my lack of experience with free motion quilting, I’m really pleased.
Next…the solid black border, which has been machine-sewn on and simply needs a hand-sewn finish.