Free Motion Quilting Challenge February 2012 - Tah Dah Feathered Plumes

I want to thank Darlene (SewCaGal) for managing the Free Motion Quilting Challenge 2012. Having personally manage many group efforts - swaps, challenges and group quilts I know first hand the amount of time involvement there is when managing them, especially with the on-going communication that occurs. What I have done does not begin to compare since I have not managed one where there are 2,000 participants as there are in the FMQ Challenge 2012! That is amazing!

Tah Dah! My Feathered Plumes after much and exhausting practice. It was an all day affair! In yesterday's post I wrote about having to slow down my brain! Click on brain to learn how I went about doing that whatever is left of it after practicing all day! If you have seen the picture of the quilter's brain floating around facebook you should know I was too tired to even have it processing correctly. My hubby asked me what I did while he was working and I showed him the above and said it took me all day to learn how to do this thinking he couldn't possibly understand, but he did and even encouraged me. Whew!

Though I had implemented many ideas that Diane Gaudynski gave plus my own, my plumes just were not looking like plumes, not in my drawings and not in my practice sandwiches. Oh! Diane thank you so much for your wonderful tutorial! It was fabulous. I even wrote many of your tips down in my FMQ Sketch Book. Yes - I know I am rabbit trailing. Back to the misshapen plumes. Finally, I drew with pencil lightly the shape of a finished plume and then began to pencil in my feathers to fit the guidelines. I learned sometime during the practice affair that I needed to see lines so I had something to focus on while stitching. And. . . . because I was getting tired. . . when stitching the plumes I rested a few seconds after each feather to refocus on the direction I needed to go.

My Practices

My FMQ Sketch Book

Quilt as You Go - January's Meets February's

My reworked FMQ Challenge 2012 Quilt as you Go

After posting the picture above I noticed that my feathered plumes piece was not straight. During the do over I decided the blue/aqua was too dominant. I centered the folding star and added another layer of triangles with decorative stitching and chose the batik red/orange for a border.

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