Curves Progress

Lately I feel like I am obsessed with curves!  Do you do this?  Get obsessed with a technique, or a ruler, or a thread etc and that's all you want to work on??  Well, this is me with curves right now :-D  And, I am A-OK with it!

I have loaded the Curve It Up Sampler by Sew Kind of Wonderful onto my frame and started quilting it.  I decided not to give into the temptation of an all-over quilting design across this sampler quilt and do an all custom job with a theme.

 

 Each block will be quilted with pebbles, echo quilting, free-hand tight hatching and ruler hatching - ok there's a plan :-D  The hardest part is deciding what to quilt to me sometimes.  Especially on a quilt that I really like and want to push myself on ;-)

Where it all stalled was the background fill for me.  My first impulse was to cross-hatch and then do a tight fill in every second square.  That sounded like a lot of work to me so I tried to think of something else - maybe a pebble fill?  Again a lot of work!

I put off the background for as long as I could until . . . . 

 

 Oops!  I am almost out of thread!!  Time to order more FilTech Glide White!  This is my go-to thread - I love the shine, the strength and the lack of link not to mention the amazing pre-wound bobbins they offer.  Disclosure - if you use the Glide link to sign up and purchase it is a referral link so that I can get a few "Stitch Points" for future orders :-D

In the mean-time can focus on the background and use 60 weight thread to contrast with the 40 weight thread.

 

I decided to go with my first impulse and do the cross-hatching ;-)  Doing the ruler work is time-consuming but I love it!  It's so rewarding.

 

I was right - the cross-hatch fill is a lot of work but wow!  I love it! I love the way it looks :-D  You probably can't tell but the thinner thread for the background fill looks really nice.  It melts into the fabric a bit more than the 40 weight Glide Thread.

 

After doing the cross-hatching for a while I found that using my Clover Hera marker to make a pleat in the fabric to mark the spacing was much easier for me and I don't have any blue lines to wash out later.

But, again, I hit a stalling point - I need my thread order to quilt the blocks!!  It should be here tomorrow so I won't have long to wait ;-)

I was so tempted to start a new project as I have a few new patterns burning a hole in my  project binder but I decided to be a good girl instead and pull out my incomplete Metro Rings project.  I have 12 blocks finished - which is what the pattern called for; but, I had decided to make the project bigger than a lap quilt early on.

 

So, the project came out and I put a few hours into cutting more white fabric and piecing the blocks together.  It feels good to work on this again - it's a WIP (work in progress) again instead of a UFO banished to my overflowing quilt closet!  I have so many tops in there to quilt so I need to stay focused and get some projects done, especially when I really like the project, instead of jumping onto the next one!   I think that I will work on this project for a while longer.

I find that if I keep a project out on my sewing table, pieces sorted and ready to go, with the machine set up with the appropriate thread etc I will sit down and put a few minutes in here and there.  I call this my "pockets of time" as in I use little bits of free time to do some work and these "pockets" really add up to get a lot of work done!  The key is to be set-up and ready to work so that if I have 15 minutes free I get 14 minutes of productive work done.  The set-up is the work - the sewing is the fun ;-)

So, are you a quilter who works on one project at a time or multiple projects like me??  How do you decide?  I would love to hear your comments!