I’ve been following this quilter on YouTube and Facebook ever since I got my frame. She mostly does edge to edge free-motion quilting and makes it look so easy. She never talks much but showed clips and/or videos of her quilting.
I’ve liked
most of her posts and occasionally hinted for a book and she never said ‘yes’
but never ‘no’ either. I was pleasantly
surprised when she soon afterwards said she’s playing with the idea of an
online course. She asked whether we’d
prefer zoom live classes or online courses and I voted for online as her day is
my night and I don’t stay awake one minute after 8 pm and then I have no
concentration skills left anyway.
Then came
her announcement that her course would be available somewhere in July. Wonderful timing even though cash strapped
now that I’m on pension I figured we could simply eat less but this course I
will do seeing that it is my birthday gift to myself in my birthday month.
I do realize
that I didn’t NEED this course. I am already comfortable with most of the
motifs BUT between what you see, think you can do and hear what should be
remembered is a whole world of knowledge and with my failing memory I need all
the reminders I can get. I recently went
shopping while Telene Jeffrey presented a course. I was not allowed to attend because I don’t
belong to our local guild and I mentioned to the shop owner that I would have
loved to attend. She kindly too said
that I was way beyond this course and just before she spoke, I heard something
Telene said that I’ve heard before but totally forgotten, so I don’t
believe in ‘you don’t need that course’.
So here I
was finding fabric to use for my practice sheet. This was fun. Long, long ago
when quilting friend Karin and I used to travel, not only abroad but locally
too, we shopped aggressively for fabric.
Even with way too much money for spending, we’d still look for those
cheapies leaving us to end up with fabric we have no idea where to use
when. We giggled a while ago about each
having roughly 3 meters of beige canvas-like fabric. Why and what for??
In my
search I found this what I guess once used to be pure white, now almost
off-white yardage. Too thin for
sheeting, not sure why I decided it was a good buy…. Price maybe? Well, this would be my sampler for this
course. I figured it I used pretty
quilting thread, it would work wonders.
Crap….
After attaching my zipper leaders, I wisely decided to use a permanent marker
to divide the fabric into squares and after tediously marking and drawing lines,
I realised I did all of that on the backing.
Man, o man, how thoughtless can one human be? Anyway, now I will have white backing fabric
with random black lines across the back.
Darn!!
Filler
number one of this course was the ever so loved by all quilters,
meandering. I am rather comfortable with
this but can one really ever practise enough?
When my next customer quilt arrived, I asked permission to do meandering
on the quilt and she agreed. The tricky
part was that Adria suggested your little bubble should be the size of a US
quarter…… now which size would that be in South African currency? Had to ask a few questions and make a couple
of calls. It turned out to be roughly the
size of a 5 Rand coin, I can do that! This
was the customer quilt I did
Then I loaded my practice piece just to realise I didn’t have batting or at least not a large enough piece. Not a problem though. I am simply going to lay off-cut pieces next to each other and quilt over all of it without joining beforehand. This is after all a practice piece.
I basted
the whole piece beforehand, firstly to secure the batting pieces and secondly
it will allow me to take the piece on and off the frame whenever I get a customer
quilt.
I decided on a very colourful variegated thread by Superior threads called Rainbows, the colour is no 813. I have no idea where and when I purchased this, it was in my thread stash.
My meander test square, roughly 16” x 16” is done and now I can move on with the online video to learn more about the next motif.
No comments:
Post a Comment