Saturday, April 16, 2011

The 9 by 12 Transformation Challenge

My friend Jo encouraged me to join in on this on-line challenge being run by Leah Day of 365 Days of Free-motion Quilting blog. I think the blog has now been re-named as The Free Motion Quilting Project. The challenge is to make a small quilt (9" by 12") using a minimum of 5 of Leah's designs from the project, using the theme "Transformation".

I chose to use Radio Static, Chain of Pearls, Matrix Flow, Bed of Roses and Bubble Wand. Let me tell you I found it quite a challenge to get that many different designs into such a small space and still have them look recognizable.

I decided to combine the quilting I wanted to use with the Darned Quilts technique I learned in Dena Crain's class at Wellington Symposium.
These are the fabrics I chose:
I curvy strip pieced them:
Then I quilted the whole piece:
This is what the back looks like so you can see clearly the quilting designs I used:
Closeups of the back:
In the first from the bottom up I have used  Bubble Wand, a square meander, Matrix Flow, a mini Greek key and Radio Static
This next one shows, from bottom up, Bed of Roses, Chain of Pearls and some straight lines:
Continuing from the bottom up I then used a flower motif that was printed on the fabric, a leaf design I made up myself and I finished with Matrix at the top:

Here are some closeups of the front:
This section has Chain of Pearls, Bed of Roses and Radio Static
This has Matrix and the leaf I designed myself
 These ones are not Leah's designs. The flowers were just outlining the print of the fabric and on the stripe fabric I chose to do straight lines in the opposite direction
And what does the finished quilt look like?

It is called "Changes"

4 comments:

Julie said...

WOW spectacular work Helen, I love the close up of the machine quilting, inspires me to try these kinds of free motion designs in the near future.

Kiwifruit-Shiree said...

It looks FANTASTIC!!! I am really impressed. I follow Leah's site, it is great huh.

Anonymous said...

Enjoyed your "Changes" and the many different quilt patterns. Interesting to read that you quilted the strips before you completed the quilt. There is a group that uses "made" fabric....scraps sewn together to make fabric before they us it to make quilt blocks.... would be a great way to get some practice and not obsessive of it all be challenge quality.... Thanks for sharing your project.

Dena Crain said...

Am I right, Helen? You won?! Congratulations!!

It seems my Darned Quilts students are taking awards all over the place!

I LOVE Leah's Free Motion Quilting Project. I turn to it myself for a few ideas from time to time.

Will I see you in Taupo in 2013? I hope so!