All Hooped Up and Ready to Go (aka Thanks Mum!)

I have finally bitten the bullet and prepared my Jacob's Ladder quilt for hand quilting.  It took me and mum about four hours (thanks Mum, you're a star!)  to hand baste it but I think we did a good job, it seems very secure.  So "all" I have to do now is quilt it :-P



I have bought a selection of different coloured cotton quilting threads so I can keep with the multicoloured scrap vibe.  Am finding the thread damn slippery stuff, it keeps trying to escape from the spools.  Any tips on preventing this would be gratefully received!

I haven't made any more liberated houses this week, but have made four little liberated stars for  Gman's red and black quilt.  These are only three inches across so difficult to get them to lay flat for a photo but I think they look quite sweet.  I will probably make a few pinwheel blocks this size too and intersperse with plain black squares to make up the next border.  That way I can lop bits off or add bits on to make the borders the right size, without worrying about having to match anything up.  It's not lazy, it's liberated :-)

Twinkliest Star

I had a go at a liberated star to match my latest house, and I love it!  I have made stars before, in the conventional way, but this is much more fun and I think it looks better - it twinkles more :-)



Hand Quilting Experiments

Further to my previous post about hand quilting with pearl cottons, I bought me this yummy selection of pearl cotton no.5 size:



When I had finished drooling over them and stroking them, I set to work on hand quilting an orphan Jacob's Ladder block with them:





I didn't have a plan, but just kind of doodled and experimented.  As you can see, I wasn't lying when I said I don't "do" small and neat stitching (you don't even want to know what the back looks like)!!    I did discover that, although I fancy the idea of being spontaneous and unplanned, I actually got on much better when trying to follow a line eg on the black paisley triangle.  I think I overdid the amount of quilting because the overall effect is to make a kind of stiff quilt.  Still, Action Man doesn't seem to mind :-)



For my second experiment, I used pearl no. 8 thread, which I got off Ebay.  I decided to stencil a design first so I could practice following lines.  I grabbed a couple out of the kids art collection - a duck and some little hearts. I did discover that my purple disappearing marker isn't great for this purpose because (a) I can't see the lines on the darker fabrics, and (b) I am not quick enough to keep up with it, half the duck had faded by the time I got round the bend ;-)



I much  prefer the look and especially the feel of this little quilt.  Unfortunately, because I changed more than one factor at the time (thread, needle, wadding, design) I don't know why it feels so much nicer!  The wadding is 100% bamboo (the previous was a cotton/soy blend) but don't know if this is why it feels nicer, or if it is because the stitching is not as dense.  Would be interested to hear from more experienced quilters on this.