Bloom

I finished quilting and binding this little mini quilt over the weekend. I am really excited because it's the first free motion quilting I've done that turned out relatively decent and frustration free. Yes, I've been getting up the gumption for at least a year to give FMQ another try, and I finally did it!

This little quilt started out as a 15 minute play scrap block, that morphed into a flower and needed a cheery orange garden setting.

I tried echo quilting around the flower...

Stippling in the background...

Loops in the "grass"...

Adding veins to the leaves....

My free-motion quilting has a long way to go, but I figure one day I'll look back on this project and appreciate the journey. Mostly, I'd like to improve my stitch length evenness and figure out how to keep the thread tension balanced. My machine is pretty basic (I am kind of surprised I can drop the feed dogs actually) so I have a feeling that a proper quilting machine would make the job easier, but that's not in the budget for me for a while.

In any case, this is now a happy little birthday gift for a very special person who admired this piece on my blog. A lovely winter bloom!