I made this Divided Blooms quilt for my niece, Emily for her wedding. This pattern was designed by Carolyn Muffitt of Free Bird Quilting Designs in Melbourne, Australia. Carolyn does the most beautiful free motion quilting, which inspired some of the designs that I used on this quilt.
This quilt is perfect for a longarmer because it has all of that negative space built into the pattern. Negative space is the empty space on the fabric which gives you room to put in all sorts of free motion quilting.
In the case of this pattern I stitched in more of those divided blooms in that negative space to mimic the fabric blooms that are appliquéd onto the top by hand. This was my first appliqué quilt.
In the case of this pattern I stitched in more of those divided blooms in that negative space to mimic the fabric blooms that are appliquéd onto the top by hand. This was my first appliqué quilt.
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| Fussy Cutting the fabric. |
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| Getting ready to appliqué the petals on. |
The fabric I used for this quilt is Lecien Memoire a Paris, which is a gorgeous floral lawn fabric. The background fabric is a yarn dyed linen from Lucien. All of the petals were fussy cut and then sewn on by hand using an appliqué stitch. Stitching all those pretty petals onto the fabric took almost a month, with a lot of life happening in between all those tiny stitches. I will always remember watching the last episodes of The Game of Thrones while I sat and did the hand stitching.
Having spent a month making the quilt top, I was more than a little leary of just putting it directly onto my longarm and stitching it without some sort of practice first. I haven't done much free motion quilting and, in fact, this is only my third quilt with FMQ in it. What I did was to take a whole cloth and load it onto the longarm and trace petals onto it and then quilt it out to decide which designs I liked and to get some experience in stitching them.
Doing a practice piece first gave me the confidence that I needed to go forward with the actual quilt. Also, the practice piece turned out nice enough that I put binding on it and packed it up along with the wedding quilt to send to my niece. You can never have too many quilts, right?
Then it was finally time to put the wedding quilt onto my longarm!
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| I always love the way a quilt looks all tucked up on the longarm! |
In the borders and sashings I free motioned some leaves. This is the very first design I taught myself to make when I got my longarm last summer. Here is a short video showing how I make them. If you don't know anything about a longarm this will show you how I move the sewhead with my hands to "doodle" as I go.
For this quilt I used Quilter's Dream Wool Batting to give those pretty petals some dimension. Originally I was going to use a double batting to give them some serious loft but after doing some research I found out that a double batt would have made the quilt heavy and I wanted a "snuggly" quilt.
I used Isacord 40 weight thread in #02922 - Muslin for both the top thread and the bobbin and I used a Schmetz Topstitch 90/14 needle.
I took some individual pictures of the quilt squares as I stitched them out. I have enough fabric left from the fat quarter bundle to do two more of these quilts and I wanted to remember my designs for the next time I do one. I over exposed the pictures so that you can see the stitching lines.
The free motion quilting got much easier as I went. The part that I really enjoyed was planning out the designs for each square. I would free motion the larger elements in first and then go back and stitch around them to fill in all of the space.
My FMQ is certainly not perfect, but I'm really proud of it! And curiously, I discovered that I do FMQ with only one hand. I'm used to doing ruler work with one hand because you use the other hand to hold the ruler and I guess I just got used to that. Does anyone else use one hand for FMQ?
I choose a pink background and binding for the quilt. I've already sent away for a blue fabric for my next one.
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| The binding rolled up on a "Binding Baby" to hold it while I stitch the binding onto the quilt. |
I was kinda nervous in the beginning of this process because although I knew I could do well on appliquéing the quilt top; I just didn't know if I could do it justice on the longarm because I'm so inexperienced with free motion quilting. I'm really glad that I thought to do a practice whole cloth first. It gave me the confidence that I needed to do the wedding quilt.
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| The Love Birds ❣️ |
I hope my niece loves it and gets to snuggle with it and her new hubby for many, many years to come!
