UFO #7!

I’m still plowing through my UFOs. Once upon a time, I took a class with Dianne Hire called Positive/Negative Scrollwork. This was a cool experiment on positive and negative space in quilt design. I had gotten as far as applying fusible to the fabric, cutting out the shapes, and fusing the shapes onto two of the four squares. Each square is 12 1/2″. That’s what I had pulled out of the closet.

So now I had to fuse the other two squares, then align the four squares so that the scrollwork design lined up across all four squares. Then I had to sew the four squares together, making sure that the design still lined up. For some reason, I had trimmed two of the squares smaller, but it worked anyway.

I had planned to satin stitch around all the raw edges to give the piece some texture. But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get a smooth satin stitch. The tension was off, either too loose or too tight. I tried with two different sewing machines, and still couldn’t get it to work. Finally I got tired of ripping out, so gave up and just sewed a straight stitch 1/8″ away from all the edges.

The stitches are hard to see, but believe me, they look great!

I’m actually planning to quilt this piece myself. I think echo quilting in the background will do the trick. This will probably take me a while, so in the meantime, here’s an update on UFO #2:

UFO #2 is a purple and yellow star quilt that was a group project from the Souhegan Valley Quilt Guild. I sent it off to the lovely and talented Kyra Reps to quilt it for me. Kyra performed her magic, and made it truly fabulous.