I attended a Gammill Education conference recently to get more savvy with my Statler and when I got home I was anxious to start trying some of the exercises we learned, so I got right to work on a quilt that was already on my frame. I had begun by fitting an edge to edge pattern within a funky boundary so that it would stop at the straight line section I had used to separate the white background from the colourful diamond area. I did a do a few os the lines with my ruler before I left for the conference, and when I got home and ready to continue with this project, I decided to let my Statler take care of the rest of those lines for me!
I placed diamond shaped patterns in the coloured blocks did some stretching and tweaking with the various “handles” available to me in my software, and even converted drawn lines to boundaries so I could easily fit them in place without having to mark off new areas.
I had fun playing with the features we had covered in our lessons and managed to produce an end product that was both satisfying to me and the result of several learning experiences, as I had to make some adjustments to accommodate a few very thick corner areas where a lot of fabric met up with a lot more fabric and created bumps that weren’t pleasing to my quilting foot. This doesn’t usually happen, especially when I use my spoon foot that glides over pretty much everything without issue. However, a few of the joins on this quilt pattern were sheer craziness and it was more beneficial to design around them than to plan on stitching through them.
Believe it or not, this coloured sections of this quilt were paper pieced – yup, I decided to make it anyway! (pattern is Ancient Radiance from Missouri Star Quilt Co.) – and even at that, they didn’t all line up perfectly. I’m more likely to blame myself than the pattern, and in the end it doesn’t matter because even with the imperfections, the overall effects of this design are really cool and I love how it turned out!
Ann Walsh Quilting 