Sometimes my Nana trades me fabric in exchange for quilting a quilt top for her. This quilt is one of those times. She made this tie dye quilt using charm packs and then entrusted it to me. She said she wanted FMQ with white thread, but other than that told me to do whatever. I thought this quilt would be the perfect start to my boldly quilted challenge.
I was originally going to try swirls, but after practicing on a scrap quilt sandwich, I realized that I was not quite ready for that yet. Instead I decided to try ‘scalloped bubbles’ from Southern Charm Quilts. She did a series a while back about ‘How to Quilt it’ and this design was included in part one. While that was the original goal, I would not really call my finished project the ‘scalloped bubbles’ that she demoed.
When I first started I was like ‘oh my gosh I have ruined it!’. I thought it looked weird and you could see every white stitch on the blue back and I was very concerned y’all. I adjusted my tension (it was off) and then just went for it and hoped for the best. It was too late to turn back.
Traditionally you start FMQ (or at least I do) with a strip from one corner of the quilt to the other, then you fill in a side, then the other side. I am not sure what happened, but I didn’t do that. I sort of filled in a corner of the quilt by going side to side and then realized I needed to reassess what the heck I was doing. Once I stopped and adjusted my tensions and really took a look I realized that what I had going looked an awful lot like fish scales and I thought that was pretty cool. If I went ahead and did a diagonal strip and then filled in the sides, I would loose that fish scale affect. So I decided to keep going from side to side, a row of scales at a time. This meant that I often had to turn the quilt weird ways so that it would fit in the neck of my machine. Which meant that some times I was making the scales sideways, right ways, or upside down, but this was the cost of a fish/mermaid tail look. It ended up taking almost 2 medium sized spools of thread and 7 bobbins, but I finished it in 24 hours over the weekend. I got really into it y’all, it was so much fun.
Remember that when you are quilting that pretty much any new design looks weird and bad in the beginning until you fill it out more. Don”t freak out until you are at least a 1/3 of the way (I would suggest a 1/2) done.
I am super happy with the way this quilt turned out and I am so glad that I tried something new. First of five quilt for the boldly quilted challenge done!
