I need more decorations for our apartment. It's something my husband and I say to each other every couple of months--"Hey, we should get more art and stuff to put on our walls." "Oh yeah, honey, the walls are so white and bare, you're right." And then we look at nice photography and stuff that we absolutely fall in love with but never get around to buying.
Happiness arrived in my mailbox again the other day: a darning foot! I have a cheap Singer machine that so far has done its job quite well, but the Singer website was decidedly unhelpful when it came to determining what additional feet would fit on my model machine. After figuring out that mine is a "low-shank" machine, I looked at several pictures of presser feet and finally decided "This type will fit for sure!" and ordered a Brother brand darning foot because it had good reviews on Amazon. Thankfully, it fit perfectly, but I debated what I wanted my first free-motion qulting practice to be on--I didn't have any projects ready for quilting, and the thought of practicing free-motion quilting for the first time on something really big was kind of daunting.
Digging through all the scraps I got a couple of weeks ago, I found a square of orange that reminded me of my older cat. And then needing more stuff for our bare walls plus wanting to practice quilting on something small with my darning foot resulted in this:
 |
| Hey! I'm all blocky and soft now! |
I affectionately refer to these as the "Moby" (gray) and "Dreadnought" (orange) blocks, as those are the names of my cats. Except now every time I talk about their quilt blocks, they hear their names and run towards me, meowing, thinking it's food time. Maybe I should make a cat food quilt block?
I have yet to try free motion quilting. I don't know why, but it scares me. These blocks look great! I think starting small is the way to go when learning something new, so maybe I will get out that darning foot in the near future.
ReplyDeleteFree-motion quilting scared me too! I'm glad I practiced with something small--and before I quilted the kitty blocks, I grabbed some fabric scraps and practiced tugging the fabric through the machine, as well. It ended up actually being kind of fun, though definitely not perfect--if you could look closely at the kitty blocks, you could see some stitches are twice as long as others due to me pulling on the fabric too fast or too hard and such. But it's nice letting your hands and mind meander across the fabric! I recommend trying it soon!
ReplyDelete