Free Motion Friday : Elate Quilt

A quick FMF today, this Elate Quilt! It’s a commission for a client, and she requested nordic birds and lots of texture. So my plan is this:

• Quilt the giant birds in bright/neon thread (Customer request). As a general rule when I quilt for clients I take no requests. However, as this quilt was a commission we discussed a few different things, and we decided that I would quilt nordic birds. I played a bit with the scale and number of birds, and in the end I decided these giant birds where the ones I like. I drew and placed them with Adobe Illustrator, and later I will mark them on using my projector and a water-erase marker.

• Each different colour in the quilt will have its own fill/texture quilted into it, in a matching thread. I am so excited about this, I love this type of quilting. It’s so fun to play with.

As I was typing out my plan for this quilt, I thought to myself… what this quilt needs is a border.

Or course, figuring out how to quilt that in is going to be an adventure. I’ve drawn in the outline though, and I’m kinda crazy about it. I’m thinking if I do half inch stripes in the neutral colour of each block, following around the border, that should give enough of a border effect. I don’t want to quilt the coloured sections all the same in the border, because I’m really attached to the different-textures-for-different-colours thing. But I’ll have to think about this a bit while I load the quilt this week!

Stay tuned on my Instagram and Facebook for progress shots as I quilt this out!

If you have a quilt you don’t know how to quilt, maybe it can be part of Free Motion Friday! Shoot an email to me with a photo to kathleen (at) kathleenquilts.com!

Later days,
Kathleen.