Permission to play -1

I don’t quilt as much as the quilters in our area may believe and only have a small window of opportunity late afternoon and not necessarily every afternoon.  My other chance is over weekends if granddaughter doesn’t stay over but I have learnt to make the most of my quilting time. When I am done for the day I make very sure that my sewing room is neat and whatever would be next on my agenda would be prepared in order for me to just get going.

With this limited time however I would always be feverishly working on one of my next quilts.  I do work on more than one project as I tend to get bored with one technique, colour scheme or pattern rather fast.  So in trying to make yet another bed quilt and get it done, I hardly ever allow myself time to simply play with my hobby.

When I taught quilting classes, I did this (playing) much more as I had to experiment, test and make smaller projects to be able to accomplish this during a class.  For the last couple of years however I only make bed quilts.

I saw a post on a Facebook page (Sit down free motion quilters) by Sandra Pearson on how she coloured a quilted piece with Inktense pencils and although I have done this before, I couldn’t resist doing another.  So off to the copier I went, tracing the image onto fabric, and then started quilting on the lines. I used neutral thread on the background and can truly say I dislike this.  Even though with the free-motion foot, it felt like stitching heaps of straight line stitches.  Next time I’d rather go back to my old way of stitching quilt motifs with coloured thread and just enhance these with Inktense pencils.

It felt like it took forever and a day to get all the lines stitched but I did it.

Then I sprayed the piece with water to get rid of the blue lines.

I got the rest of my toys ready.

And it turned out to be nothing more than “colouring for adults” this time simply on fabric.  I am quite convinced I won’t do this again but I am this far, so I might just finish it up.