Choosing quilting patterns… and other life’s bits (new sewing room!)

Hi everyone,

hope your Fall is going well and it is as colorful as mine here – I just LOVE fall colors!! I find myself loving every season for one reason or another, but fall is by far the most spectacular when it comes to color, don’t you agree? Just look at this glorious color display!

 Poor Marley is used already of me stopping every so often and not only taking pictures all the time but trying to get him to stay and pose too… Poor guy! Doesn’t his face look like saying “really mom, another photo?”, ha ha! Good thing he loves me…

But I “spread” my annoying habits to other family members too – Oliver, our grand-puppy is getting quite good in posing too during our Monday walks when this grandma is baby-sitting (by far the BEST part of my week!!)

OK, back to quilting now.

Remember that project I worked on two weeks ago and shared a peek and few small quilting tips? I can finally show you the whole thing, yay! My friend Martha’s new pattern, Cherry Orchard is on the web site and this little table topper is actually a BONUS you will get as a free download, when you buy a pattern – how cool! So here it is:

I love the hexagon shape!! And yet, it is really not difficult to piece (Martha’s instructions are really clever and make it easy!). The original pattern is for a lap size quilt and a long table runner and this hexagon shaped topper is a bonus.

Isn’t this gorgeous?

So now you see that I was right to be a bit nervous when Martha asked me to quilt the hexagon topper for her? 🙂  (read about it HERE)
So here is a little story on how I wen about choosing what to do, thought you might want to know or it might inspire you to try something new?
Starting in the center (as you always should – quilt from center of the quilt – out) – here is a blank hexagon:

My FMQ instinct immediately thought of some feathery plumes…or some cherries and leaves…but I decided to try “less is more” way and go just for some straight line hexagon echo:

Here is one thing that I did and SHOULDN’T: instead of going for the TRUE “from the middle, out” way and marked the center (smallest) hexagon first and then echo it with bigger ones – I went for stitching in the ditch around the dark plum border and then echoing towards the center. I got away with it this time and was very careful about keeping everything straight…so no puckers in the middle, but I am telling you – DON’T DO IT this way, it’s risky and tricky!
OK, dodged that bullet (and learned my lesson in NOT being lazy to mark things!), let’s go to the next step:

This was the basic unit here, the cherry tree. I knew I wanted background around the tree to be more densely quilted so that tree “pops out” and then something fairly simple within the tree. So I went first with some tight spirals around the TOP of the tree:

At this point I switched from sage green Aurifil 50wt thread to the dark purple/plum one, to quilt the cherry trees. Decided to go with quilting three cherries and some leaves in them. Never did cherries before but decided to be brave, ha ha.

It might be a bit hard to see it, since print is quite busy, but you know what – that was a perfect and very forgiving way to try our that motif (other than doodling on paper, which I did first!) – busy print really hides your quilting!

Hope you can see cherries? 🙂

Now it was the time to go tackle the triangle space between cherry trees and bottom of the trees (and switch back to the sage green thread color). By now I was “brave” with those cherries and decided that a pair of them should go right there on display! Now I was a bit nervous and decided to actually just lightly draw them, just to have a guide…
Can you see it?

It was very light, I even used just regular pencil for this… And then, VOILA – cherries! 🙂

What do you think? OK?
I was actually quite happy with them! (and that is not always the case, I can be really harsh to myself…)
Once cherries were all done, time for the bottom of the trees space and some “grass” in form of modified McTavishing – that I was comfortable with! 🙂

And finally, for the outer border, I went back to something I am not as good at but want to get better (yeah, you guessed it – it was back to that forgiving, very busy print! he he…) – PEBBLES! I am so not good at pebbles yet, but getting better… I hope! 🙂

Pebbles from the back…