Saturday, September 5, 2020

Of Butterflies for Modern Baby Clam Shells, a Veteran's Quilt, + Pantograph Patterns

Good morning and happy Labor Day weekend to readers in the United States! I am DELIGHTED to share that I finally finished piecing the body of my Modern Baby Clam Shells quilt top!

Modern Baby Clam Shells Top is Pieced!

I'll be adding 2" borders in the same Grunge Sky background fabric later today. For the moment, I'm just reveling in my smooth curves and the fact that this top came out so flat and so square.

[Note to self: Machine piecing a clam shell quilt combines Y-seams with curved seams. Definitely doable, but it was fiddly and tedious and it took me a week to piece this little baby quilt. Next time you need a QUICK baby quilt, stick to straight seamed patterns!]

In addition to adding narrow borders to this top, there's one more step before I'm ready to quilt it. I want to add one or more Monarch butterflies (sentimental connection for this baby's mom and grandmother). When I was first hunting for Monarch butterfly fabric nearly two years ago, when I started this project, I didn't see any fabric prints with Monarch butterflies that had the right aesthetic for what I had in mind. So I found this embroidery design at Urban Threads here:

This is a large design, and if I end up using it on this quilt I will probably just embroider one 7" butterfly design in the center circle of the quilt. I played around with the design in my Bernina Designer Plus v8 embroidery software, with an imported image of my Grunge Sky background fabric so I could fine-tune the thread colors to get the look I'm envisioning. I want this to be instantly recognizable as a Monarch.

I have the option of deleting that scroll background entirely in my embroidery software if I don't like it. Or, if I do use the scroll background with the butterfly design, I can also copy the scroll background and use it as a background for a quilt label or a monogram.

HOWEVER... Another option for my butterflies has presented itself this morning! In my Bernina users' forum on Groups.io, one of the members had posted a photo of a bag project she'd recently completed. One of the fabrics used for that bag was a butterfly print that caught my eye because I recognized a couple of Monarchs in the print AND the color palette and style of the print looked like a good match for the Moda Painted Garden layer cake prints I used in my clam shell quilt. The maker of that bag got back to me today with the selvage information and I was able to find a yard of it for sale on eBay for $3.50.

See what I mean? I have to wait and at least see this fabric in person before I go ahead with machine embroidery. I'm not sure of the scale but I think these are smaller, so I'd be appliquéing several of them onto the quilt top, probably by machine, either with a turned edge or else fused edges with a machine blanket stitch for a more "handmade" appearance.

There are pros and cons to each method. That giant butterfly embroidery might look really cool in the center of the quilt, but I might have issues with puckering from the dense embroidery on lightweight quilting cotton fabric if I don't stabilize it adequately, hence the need for sewing out one or more test embroideries before embroidering the actual quilt top. I may need one or more test sewouts to finalize my thread colors in real life, too, and it's not as easy to predict how the colors work together with a design like this that extensively blends several shades of orange and yellow. The experimenting I did in my software was a good starting point, but I want to be 100% sure with a test stitch before committing to embroidering the quilt top. It could take several tries before I have the stabilizers and thread colors just right... And did I mention that this design has an estimated stitch time of 58 minutes, with nearly 45,000 in the design? I could spend an entire day, or several days, just getting ready to sew this design on my quilt top before I actually stitch it out for real. If I get too much puckering, I can go back to my software and experiment with reducing the stitch density, but I want to be sure I have enough thread coverage that the teal blue background fabric doesn't show through the embroidered design.

Then there's the question of quilting. I had two different allover pantograph designs in mind for this quilt. The first one is Daisies Galore from Timeless Quilting:

And the second option is Passion Vine, also from Timeless Quilting:

Now, if I've got a beautiful 7" butterfly embroidered in the center of my quilt top, I am not going to want to quilt a pantograph design right over top of the embroidery. I think that would look bad as well as risking technical difficulties like thread breaks, skipped stitches, or even a broken needle during quilting. So, if I embroider a giant butterfly in the middle of the quilt top, I'm going to want to finagle the pantograph in some way so that I can quilt that row AROUND my butterfly rather than THROUGH my butterfly.

IF I had IntelliQuilter computer robotics installed on my long arm machine, I could program a No Sew Zone around my embroidered butterfly and tell the computer to quilt the edge-to-edge design all around the embroidery, without stitching over it. But I don't have that option for now, so I'd have to be tracing the pantograph pattern from the back of my machine while peeking over at the actual quilt top to see when I'm getting close to the embroidery. This is a dicey proposition, much like texting and driving, but I think that's what I'm going to do if I go with the embroidered design.

Whereas, if I cut out a handful of butterflies and appliqué them to my quilt top here and there, I would feel much more comfortable quilting the pantograph across the entire surface of the quilt without regard to where the appliqués are located.

And then there's a tempting but unlikely-to-be-chosen third idea that I came across on Instagram recently. Check out the pretty feather variations that Andrea Munro of Practical Dazzle has free motion quilted on her clam shell quilt:

That would be so much FUN, and custom quilting my clam shell quilt would make it easier to keep the quilting off any embroidery and/or appliqué. The downside to this -- MAJOR downside -- is that it would take so much longer than an edge to edge pantograph design AND it would up the ante for the second baby quilt for the toddler's soon-to-be-born baby brother. Remember that I want to have BOTH of these quilts finished and shipped out by next month, and the baby brother's quilt isn't even started yet. I don't want to go overboard with the girl's quilt and then not be able to do something comparable for the baby boy. But I just had to show you Andrea's clam shell quilt because I love it so much!

Meanwhile, as I wait for the butterfly fabric to come in the mail, I've got this veteran's hospice outreach top ready to load on my long arm frame. It was pieced by another member of The Charlotte Quilters Guild.

I know that many quilters would pick a quilting design with stars for a top like this, but that's too predictable and matchy-matchy for my taste. Instead, I've chosen this Flirty Bubbles pantograph because it reminds me of streamers and confetti at a military parade: