Addie's Quilt - Sandwich and FMQ beginnings!

August is here!!  YAY!!  :)

OK, ok... Yes, I'm making a reference to my previous post, which was suprisingly close this one.  I figured that I'd better take advantage of precious time while I can sit at the computer and finally finish this post that has been in the draft mode for a while now...

 

Little Addie time it is!  She's growing too fast, and she is super cute!  I wonder if she'll ever visit this post and enjoy seeing how her quilt was made.  Who knows! Maybe it will be the perfect motivation for a sweet little girl to make friends with needles and threads! 

We left off in the back of Addie's quilt, which means that the next step was the quilt sandwich. I don't have much room to pin a quilt sandwich, so I use a wonderful flat space: the floor!  :)  

I use regular masking tape to secure the back.  It actually works great!  I was able to keep everything from moving, but I also got a bit of tension.

Now, the batting...

...and making sure it's all straightened out.

And here comes the top with all the strippy diamonds!!  :)

After some knee work, it is all pinned and ready to be quilted!

I had a hard time finding a good angle for this picture.  Despite all my efforts, light was kind of dark, so I tried to enhance the colors with the computer.  I'm not really happy with the results, but I hope you can get a general idea of how close the pins are. This really depends on the kind of batting you are using; however, I like having things secure while shifting and squishing and wiggling the quilt around the sewing machine. 

Of course, the more pins around the sewing area, the more careful you should be when moving the quilt. Just be ready to bump into one; and yes, I said "be ready."  Once you are familiar with the pattern you are quilting (either by sketching or quilting), you know the direction, curves, angles and movement.  This definitely helps with when and where to expect a pin bump.

Here are two other angles. Note that there are two pins in each diamond, in opposite squares, there is one in each intersection and one more in the sashing, close to the middle of the block.  I like doing this to keep seams where they should be. 

I really didn't have a specific plan for the quilting. I watched Crafty's free QuiltCon Lecture Series 2013; in it, there is a seminar by Angela Walters and she mentioned that she likes the quilting to enhance the piecing - brilliant! That idea has stayed with me and I always think of it whenever I think of quilting, whether it is admiring already finished quilts, or me being in the process of deciding how to quilt.

So, use your imagination and take a look at one intersection...  Can you see the invisible lines going from one block into the adjacent ones?  It's almost as if there were an invisible diamond in each intersection!  

After this eureka kind of moment, I used my smaller square ruler to roughly mark a diamond at each intersection, to enhance the piecing.  Note that I did not remove the pins at all; I just worked with it, remove the caps, marked and capped them again.

FMQ beginnings - what an exciting and fuzzy moment of crafty thoughts twinkling all around.  Aaaah!  The beauty of a non-perfect chalked diamond that will transform into a bit of wonder...  And that's the stuff the next post will be about!  :)

That's the right moment I try to stop and enjoy the moment.  I thank God for the abilitites He has given me and just awe at the marvels He has created... Looking out the window, a cardinal sits majestically on the wired fence and a gorgeous lily flutters behind it, playing with the wind...

Stay blessed!

Yiya