Tula Pink - Eye Spy

This is an either you'll love it or hate it kind of quilt.  I think.  I have ended up with quite a few Tula Pink prints - left from the butterfly and added to.  I decided to make a quilt where I fussy cut the design elements for most of the blocks - hence the "Eye Spy" title.  No pattern - made it up as I went - same process I use for T-shirt quilts only with maybe a bit more control. 

Some quilting detail is below.

Sugar Skulls and some Misadventures

Sugar Skulls!  It's a Tula Pink pattern from the book Quilt With Tula and Angela by Tula Pink and Angela Walters.  

This was the last quilt in my "to be quilted" box.  It took me almost two years to get through them all  (since I stopped doing customer quilts).  Of course I made more as I went.  But now I literally have no more quilt tops to quilt.  So I guess that means I have to get busy and make some more!  😎😎😎

Here are some close ups of the quilting - spider webs, a few spiders and some "wrought iron" inspired curves in the orange.  The border is one inch piano keys with grid in the corners where they overlap and one inch grid in the skulls.

I appliqued a few flowers in the bottom - I'll talk more about that below.

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So what misadventure???

I started off with black thread and lofty ideas of "drawing" spider webs, spiders, rats, snakes and whatever creepy stuff I could think of.  These pix show a bit of what it was starting to look like.

But I decided I didn't like it.  It just looked "scribbly" and my "drawing" isn't good enough - the black thread showed all the glitches a little too much for my liking.  So I decided to rip it all out.  

And, predictably, it "left a mark".

The usual treatment of  spraying water and a finger rub took out most of the evidence.  However, the worst marks were where the spiders were - there were actually holes there.  I picked up some Bo-Nash earlier in June and thought I'd give it a try.  

This is the Bo-Nash powder before being pressed.

When I pressed it, it left a nice crunchy mend (I thought I'd taken some pix of that but I guess I didn't).  I think I used too much.  I need a Bo-Nash lesson.  Anyway, the holes were fixed in that the fabric will not fray out, but it was very visible.  I decided to go ahead and quilt the quilt as I was planning to - with orange thread this time and not be quite so adventurous with the drawing - also, I really just wanted to get it finished at this point!  I decided to hide the holes with applique once the quilting was finished, which is what I did.

I pressed some Heat'n'Bond to the back of some of the flower fabric and cut around the flower groupings that I wanted.  Then I pressed it on while it was still on the frame because I wanted to try stitching around the raw edge with the long-arm.  I did this.  Once I took it off the frame, I pressed it again to be sure it is stuck on really well.  I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out and it saved the quilt.  I wouldn't bother with stitching around the applique next time - I think it's quite well stuck on so it didn't really need the stitching at all.  If it turns out that this quilt actually does get some use, I might consider doing a satin stitch around the applique, but for now, I'm not going to bother.

One final note: I tend to experiment with my quilts - this is one experiment I would never do on a customer quilt! I do try new design ideas and usually like them - but usually the designs are a bit more conventional.  I rarely rip so this is a real exception - I usually don't hate it enough to rip.  I've quilted with contrasting thread before and really liked the results, but this time, it did not make me happy.  It was the glitchy drawing that was the deciding factor - I just was not happy with it.  Will this stop me from experimenting?  Nope.  That's what makes quilting fun - trying out new things.  Usually they work out just fine.  And it's not brain surgery so no one dies if things go sideways!  😎😎😎

More Butterfly Pix

I'm getting closer.  We rigged up a frame to hang quilts for pix taking purposes.  There are still issues of lighting and stability/squareness, but one thing at a time.  So I am finally able to get a full on pix of my Tula Pink Butterfly quilt!  Then I took a few more close ups.

Butterfly's Garden

This is my own Tula Pink Butterfly quilt.  I'm calling it "Butterfly's Garden".  I quilted one for Gillian awhile back.  Coincidentally, mine was under construction at the time.  I got the kit from Craftsy well over a year ago - I think sometime in 2016  - and started chipping away at it last spring.  I put a push on and finished the top late in the fall but didn't get around to quilting it until after Christmas.  I finally got the binding and a label on it for our long-arm group meeting yesterday so it's on the list of completed UFO's. 😎 

It's mostly Tula Pink fabric, obviously, but I did add a few stash fabrics that worked.  Also, I bought more of the background fabric for the borders.  I liked the fabric in the kit - but not for the border.  I wanted the butterfly to be the main event and felt that anything other than the background would detract from that.  I also added an extra six inches on each side because I may want to actually use this one on a bed!  In the end, it's a huge quilt - not quite king, but certainly a generous queen.

I am often asked how I figure out how I am going to quilt a quilt.  The concept for this quilt is "garden"....  keep going for more explanation ....

Because its so big, I don't have a good space in my house to get a decent shot of the whole quilt, draping it over some furniture is the best I can do (below).  Lee D, in our long-arm group, took a pix of it yesterday so I'm stealing her pix (thanks Lee!), which is the pix above.

My idea for this quilt was that it would be a garden, hence the name.  The design along the bottom border is adapted from a book of Art Deco wrought iron designs.  The idea is that it's a wrought iron fence around the garden (below).

Of course there will be other butterflies and some dragonflies in the garden.... and flowers.... and leafy things (feathers).

For this quilt, I started by ditching all the blocks in the butterfly using DecoBob thread (most of the rest of the quilting was with Glide) .  Then I quilted the antennae.  It took a couple of tries to get them more or less symmetrical as I'm not computerized - this is one place where it would be handy.  But in the end I like the organic result of not-quite-perfect.  I pinned the borders down as I went.   Once I got to the bottom of the butterfly wings, I went back and quilted the butterfly blocks. 

When the butterfly was completely quilted (I did change colours to blend with the fabric in most cases), I did the half inch outline all the way around.  Next - I  stitched in the outlines for the "wrought iron fence".   Then I stitched in the butterflies and dragonflies.  Note that I used coloured thread for these motifs.  All the rest of the background/border quilting is with white.  

I gradually worked my way around the background and border, filling it in with what I hope turns out to be fairly balanced.  I don't usually sketch out what I'm going to quilt - it's all in my head so I just hope it works because all I can see at any one time is what is between the roll bars.

A note about the grid quilting.  First - I measure it and draw it on with air erase pen.  Second - it's ruler work.  Third - I often use a grid as a background when an area needs to be quilted but I don't want to put a busy design in that place.  In the pix above, as an example, if I had put feathers where the grid is, the dragonfly would disappear.  The grid is a sort of "neutral" quilting design that goes in "behind" a motif or feature design.

Above - can't see it very well but there's a "lattice" running up along each side.

Above - the "lattice" on the right hand side - the diamond shapes.

And that's my Butterfly's Garden.