August FMQ Challenge: Wendy Sheppard's Jester Hats

I was so excited when I found out that quilter Wendy Sheppard of Ivory Spring was giving the August Free-Motion Quilting Challenge tutorial at SewCalGal.  I have admired Wendy's work for a long time.  She's a tireless, prolific, and truly inspirational person who supports and encourages the work of others.  Her Thread Talk posts contain the best quilting tips and tutorials I've seen, and I refer to them often.  To view the original August Challenge tutorial, learn more about Wendy Sheppard, and see some examples of her breathtaking quilting, click here.  Come back when you're finished.

So, you're back?  Good.  Wipe the drool off your keyboard and let's get down to business!  Wendy's tutorial covered an allover motif she calls Jester Hats.  I spent at least an hour trying to doodle repeating jester hats on my iPad before I began quilting. 

My Jester Hat doodles, drawn in FREE Paper app for iPad in the waiting room at the pediatrician's office



More Jester doodles in Drawing Pad app for iPad

I am still having trouble with these allover designs in general -- anything where I have to concentrate on stitching a shape, while simultaneously thinking about how I'm going to travel with that motif to completely fill a space without getting stuck in a corner, leaving an unquilted "island" that I can't get back to, or crossing over a previous line of quilting.  I am not thrilled with my results for this exercise, but I think it's a fun motif with a lot of potential.  Like anything else, it will get better and better with repetition.

I used a pretty fat quarter of batik fabric with ugly Bob the Builder backing fabric and a scrap of Hobbs Heirloom Tuscany Silk batting, a 75 Schmetz Quilting needle, and 40 weight YLI variegated machine quilting thread for this sample.  You can see the jester hat pattern better from the back...  and it looks much better from a distance.  Trust me!

My Jester Hats, Backing Side Up

I had trouble visualizing the jester hats, so then I tried thinking about them as the number 3, or as chubby little baby tushies, or mushrooms that turn into the horns of a ram.  With the contrasting thread color against the backing fabric, every awkward "oops" jumps out at you.  But if I was stitching this in a thread color that blended into the background fabric, I think you'd just get the effect of the pretty texture without the mistakes being so glaringly obvious.  Here's what the sample piece looks like from the front:

My Jester Hat Sample, Right Side Up

Not as bad, right?  Or so I tell myself.  Here's one of the Up Close and Ugly shots:

The View from 6"

See those weird mushroom/chef's hat thingys?  Or are they Smurf feet?  How did that happen?  When Wendy quilts jester's hats, there are definitely no Smurf feet!  Also my stitch length was all over the place, mostly because I was experimenting with speed and never quite found the right rhythm that would keep the curves smooth without being so fast that I lost control.  Next time I attempt this design, I'm going to switch back to the finer thread weight that I'm more comfortable with and try making the motifs much smaller.  I just thought this particular motif would be fun to stitch big and bold with the variegated thread.  And I'm sure it would be, if it was done well!

Meanwhile, I'm about halway finished with the free-motion paisley fill on Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt.  I'm a little nervous about how densley quilted the circles are compared to the rest of the quilt, and I hope that the whole thing will get softer and snuggly again after I wash it for the first time.  I do like the way the paisleys look, though, and I never would have believed that I could quilt this design at all if you'd asked me a month ago.  If I can learn to quilt paislies, then surely I will learn to quilt jester hats with more practice!

FMQ Paislies on Lars's Drunken Dragons Quilt (In-Progress)

I'm using Mettler 60 weight 2-ply cotton embroidery thread for Lars's quilt, and I still feel like the dense fill pattern is making it stiff.  I wonder if the silk thread that Wendy Sheppard often uses would be softer?  I think she mostly quilts with Aurifil Mako cotton thread or with YLI silk thread, neither of which my local Bernina shop stocks.  I may have to order a couple of spools online just to play with.
Okay, enough blogging -- back to quilting!

And the Quilt Goes On: FMQ PAISLIES on the Drunken Dragons Quilt!

Paisley FMQ Fill Added Between Flame Paislies

Well, it seems that all the paisley-doodling I've been doing on my iPad over the last few days has really paid off.  I only practiced stitching this paisley free-motion quilting fill pattern for a few minutes on a scrap of fabric and batting before I felt like I could start in on the real quilt -- but I've been doodlling the design on my iPad with a stylus every chance I got over the last few days.  Not only did this allow me to practice the quilting design at times when I wasn't near the sewing machine, but it also saved a lot of fabric and thread.  I'm so excited about how this looks that I had to post it right away!

Completed Half Block

Surprisingly, the small paisley fill pattern is easier for me than the large FMQ flames that I quilted earlier, radiating out from each quilted medallion design.  You don't have to move the quilt as much to stitch little shapes as you do for a long line of quilting, so I'm finding that my stitches are coming out much more evenly (more or less the same length) with less effort and the whole process just feels so RELAXING.  I think the paisley fill between large flames will help to camouflage the jerky, uneven quilting from the early part of my learning curve, and they also help to make my blazing suns look like blazing suns again instead of like big Roses of Sharon with leaves.  However, I'm going to need a lot more thread to do the remaining 35 blocks...

Now that I see how densely I ended up quilting this, I'm really glad that I choose a lightweight quilting thread instead of the pretty-but-heavy 40 weight machine quilting thread.  Already I'm feeling some stiffness that I hope will soften up when I wash the finished quilt, but if I'd used 40 wt thread I'd have a cardboard quilt by the time I was finished.  The only bummer is that the shades of Mettler 60 wt cotton embroidery thread that I chose only come on dinky little 200 meter spools, and I've already gone through at least 10 of them and I'm headed out to buy 6 more spools tomorrow.  This is not, I repeat NOT, an economical way to buy thread.  I really need to get my hands on some of that Aurifil Mako 50 weight cotton thread that everyone has been raving about -- it comes in pretty colors including variegated (love!) AND comes on nice, big spools!

I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.  This quilt, begun in October 2011, WILL be finished in less than a year.  And then I'll start another one.  ;-)