FMQ Challenge Days 4 & 5

I'm making great progress in the FMQ Challenge!
I had to skip a day because I was having socializing kind of fun. But I came roaring back this weekend by getting about 2-3 hours in each day. Since I’m doing all the black thread first, I can finally say that I completed one row of my quilt! I started my second row and am already making some fabulous progress. Here’s a picture of the back so you can see better.

It seems like that first row took forever to complete. Probably because all I could see were all the unquilted areas. Now I can see my quilted row and I feel like this project is within my reach! Some nights I feel like I have to wrestle and fight the quilt. Other nights it flows freely and we do a quilting waltz. Still a bit awkward and hesitant but my flow is improving.

FMQ Challenge

Are you participating in the FMQ Challenge? I've been having so much fun free-motion quilting that yesterday I took an hour off from work to go home and quilt!

Here's my quilt all prepped for FMQ. I basically printed the design, made several copies, and am pinning them to the top of my quilt and quilting right through the paper. I would go crazy if I had to mark every square with a feather wreath.

My second wreath! Those bright spots are the paper stuck in the quilting. They will wash out, so I don't worry about them. So far I've only picked two quilting designs and will just concentrate on those. My head hurts if I think about this quilt too much!

So I am doing feather wreaths and feather sprays. I'm doing all the black ones first because I'm sooooo lazy about changing the thread in my sewing machine! It's slow and painstaking work, but I'm getting through it. A great chance to catch up on my House episodes! My head reels every time I think about how many feathers I have to quilt. It's a little too early to tell if I'm improving yet, but I have faith!

Friday UFO Progress

This week I've been working hard on my UFO's! I started quilting on my First Quilt.

Sorry for the picture. I remembered at 6:20am to take the picture as I was running out the door to work. I really like this quilting design. It's basically a bunch of suns. I traced circles and then just free handed a bunch of radiating lines. For the most part they are straight, but I'm not going to lie: some of them start straight then dive off in a large curve. I really like how it's not just straight lines, which I wanted to use on this quilt, and that it's minimalist, which fits with the whole Asian-inspired fabric choices.

Then I started working on my second UFO. I introduced this quilt in yesterday's blog post. I worked this week on piecing the back. The quilt is huge. I couldn't get the back big enough to fit the top. It seemed like I just kept adding fabric to it forever. Then I hit on an ingenius idea: I took a row from the top and pieced it into the back. Perfect. Makes it that much smaller to wrestle through my sewing machine too!

This is me unpicking the row last night. This quilt has been upicked so many times! It took me all week to get this quilt ready for the FMQ Challenge. Piece the never-ending back, buy batting, iron the stupid pieces (believe me, that took hours!). This weekend I plan to baste it and started FMQing on Monday!

Azrael approves of the backing!

I feel really good about my progress this week, even though I didn't follow my plan of working on my First Quilt. Sometimes plans change, and right now I'm just going with the flow!