Quilt club: part two

[flick]

Yesterday's speaker at Quilt Club was Stuart Hillard, who is apparently moderately famous because he was on the first series of The Great British Sewing Bee (or whatever it was called). He did quite a funny talk, including lots of references to famous people I'd never heard of that all the LOLs were very amused by.

Today, I went to a class given by him, which was very good: he's obviously run it lots of times before. It was on different techniques for doing the actual quilting part of the quilt, and we made a sampler with various different styles of pattern on it.

This is what I did:


It's really quite hard to sew a half-circle.

I've now got several ideas for how I'm actually going to quilt the flying birds quilt, which is the main reason I went to the class: it's not the sort of design where you can do lots of straight lines.

Comments

[birguslatro]

Do you know of zentangles? They would seem a good match for quilting patterns.

[flick]

I don't, and I don't feel like I know vastly more having looked at a few websites about them, but ye: that is the sort of thing that you can do for quilting patterns. The main difference is that quilting patterns are usually continuous lines, so that you don't have to keep tying off threads!

[birguslatro]

This is a zentangle tutorial...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtcaHKMTW-4

(And there's plenty others.)

Basically, as far as I can figure out, they're made up of patterns based on reasonably arbitrary rules of your own devising. Adding continuous lines to the rules would restrain you a bit, but that'd be no bad thing. And patterns on your fabrics could be used for the dots and the like.

[flick]

Here in The Mother Country, we don't have those there bandwidths, I'm afraid!

[birguslatro]

Ah - sorry.

Ever decreasing circles... (Quilting joke!)

[yalovetz]

Some interesting patterns in there. I particularly like the one in the square on the bottom right corner - looks like wood grain with embedded leaves.

[flick]

The tutor called it 'bark and leaves'!

[ceb]

Ooh, shiny. I just got taught basic freehand machine stuff and it's so much fun!

How do you do the overlapping circles pattern? I think I can see how the rest work.

[flick]

The pattern's called wine glass -- it's a traditional hand-quilting pattern.

I've just had a look online and singularly failed to find any instructions. Here is my attempt to write it out, but if you email me I'll send you a picture of my diagram from the class (made because, like you, I thought 'I'm not going to be able to figure that out...').

Mark a 1" grid. It's sewn entirely in arcs, about 1/4"in from the grid lines (adjust for different grid sizes, natch). Tutor recommended initially pausing for a one-two stitch after each arc, as you get better you can do it continually. Start at the top left. 1) Do arcs going down the lhs. 2) At the bottom, arc along one space , then up one (point x). Go to the left, under the line, then back to point x above the line. Up one, left, right. Up one, left, right. When you get to the top, go up and then back down (not left as previously) and then continue to repeat 1, then 2, etc. At the end, you should be at the top right of your grid: go back to the start point, under the line, to complete the pattern.

(For added fun, my picture is rotated so that top right on the picture is top left in sewing order. It should in theory work anyway, but if you rotate it then it might be easier to see!)

It is far more forgiving of badly-done arcs than than you would think, as long as you meet up at the intersections of your grid squares.