Morgan's Wedding Quilt is ready for Binding

The color looks gray instead of blue, but the quilting shows up well in this photo.

I'm excited with the quilting on Morgan's quilt.  It adds such a nice texture and adds a nice feminine touch to the straight lines and squares.  As promised, I've gathered a few of the practice sketches to share with you also.  If you're looking for a good free motion teacher, I feel I've learned so much from Myrna Ficken's DVD's called Just Do It 1 & 2.  You can visit her video classes at this link.

These colors are more accurate on the backing.  It's pieced with a band of orange,etc, but mostly dark blue.

Here are 3 of the doodling pages I played with before I started with thread.  There is another one somewhere of different leaves because I was struggling with what I'd do to the inside of the leaves - veins, feathers, inner repeat of the leaf, etc....  I started with a swirl, then backed out of it, drew the leaf and finally, made the petals.  Smaller swirls and sweeping shapes filled in the gaps.

Veins inside the leaves.

Leaf shape repeated inside.  This was my final choice.

Feathers inside the leaves.

Time to pick up my teen from the first Driver's Ed class.  It should be interesting to hear how about it and about the other students in this session.

Enjoy your day!
- SeeingStars

Happy 4th of July

Patriotic Birdhouses for the 4th of July

I hope you and your family are enjoying this day and every day of freedom.  We haven't spent much of it as family time (yet).  Instead, Hubby and I went to our house to make a new list of concerns for the contractor.  We tried this last night, but it was 120 deg in the attic.  Mornings are much better for touring the house with clip board in hand.


Kids are still feeding / walking the neighbors' puppies.  They'll be home soon and everyone will be ready for lunch.  So this will be a quick blog post and then I'll scramble to serve something edible.   Maybe I can use some of our yellow tomatoes from the garden.

Here's a peek of the quilting for Morgan's quilt.  I'm really excited about how it's progressing.  Once I make time to play with our new camera and figure out lighting, I'll be even more excited to share photos with you!  For these, I did my best to force a sidelight from my TinLizzie so the quilting would be more obvious with shadowing.

This is free motion swirls with petal outlined 2 or 3 times and leaves.  I have a sketch or two that I'll add to this blog soon.  Do you doodle quilting designs before quilting them?  I usually fill up several pages to make sure my brain and hands agree on the design. 

Enjoy your Independence Day!
- SeeingStars