Quilt 56: Blue Birds and Black-Eyed Susans

I found a new source of interesting fabrics online: www.fabric.com.  They sell a wide range of different fabric, including quilting cotton.

It's a bit of a gamble to buy quilt fabric online, you're at a disadvantage without being able to touch the fabric and examine it up close.  But If you stick with known manufacturers/name brands, it should be OK.  The costs, after the exchange rate between the US and Australia, plus postage come out to slightly below what I'd pay (retail prices) at shops here.

So I found a few interesting panels with designs that I haven't seen in shops here.  This quilt is one of those.  The center panel has 6 bluebirds surrounded by Black-Eyed Susans.  I bought the panel and the flower print in the border online, then supplemented with solid homespun from my stash (the solid brown and solid yellow borders).

(click the picture above to see a larger image)

 The finished size is 45" x 62".  The binding and backing are the same solid yellow as the inner border, and the stitching is done in butter yellow thread.

I chose yellow thread because I was certain it would be the least obtrusive.  That was true mostly, but the quilting was done using my "Simply Stipple" groovy board, and I ran into trouble when I stitched over the birds - really not the effect I was wanting.



 
 So I picked out the stitches on the body of this first bird, then outlined the birds before going around them with the stippling.  It was a bit fiddly, but worked out OK.

Below you can see the effect - looks MUCH better than having stitches over the bird.

 

I found it extremely difficult to control the longarm's movement when I stitched around the birds.  The machine moved in a very uneven way, catching and grabbing, throwing me off the line I was intending to trace around the birds.  I really like these panel quilts, but I'm going to have to find a better way to handle quilting around figures like these birds.  The results on this quilt are "OK" - but not great, not quite what I was aiming for.

Hmmm....  Going to have to have a "think" about all this. 

This one will be donated to "Inspirational Quilts". I'd set myself a goal to make at least one quilt a month for them, but this is the first one this year, so I'm seriously behind schedule.  That's OK.. I'll push myself a bit and get caught up soon.

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