Anne’s Creative Threads

The weather here in Brunei is still very wet and hardly a day or night passes without heavy rain at some time, but luckily there has been no more flooding.

design with leaves added

I have done some more work on my rain forest design, adding leaves in the form of small snippets of fabric. I have just added to the trees in the background and this helps blend them in and make them look more realistic. I have also added fallen leaves in shades of brown overlapping into the lower border.  I added some machine embroidery to the leaves in the background and then the next step will be to add more undergrowth and plants.

The picture on the right shows some of the leaves and the machine embroidery.

I have taken a break from this quilt for a few days now to get on with some other projects. I belong to an Internet sewing group linked to my sewing machine and they also have a partner group for challenges which I have just joined. The challenge this month was to make a small, simple quilt and practice free motion quilting, with the resulting quilt to be donated to an animal shelter in Florida.

I thought it was a good cause and I was also keen to practice some free motion quilting on my new sewing machine so I decided to participate and raided my stash of fabrics for a plain piece to use for this quilt. I used an all over meandering design of loops and hearts from Patsy Thompson’s DVD: Free Motion Fun Volume 1.

close up of loops and hearts design

I also took this opportunity to practice sewing on the binding by machine. Normally for my art quilt wall hangings I prefer to hand sew the binding because it gives a good finish. Occasionally if I am pushed for time and it is a simple design I will machine sew the binding using invisible thread and a straight stitch on the top side, with a thread to match the binding on the reverse side. As this was to be a utilitarian quilt and withstand wash and wear I thought a machine sewn binding would be appropriate and I wanted to try out a method that I had learnt about in my quilting group. I used the same variegated cotton thread that I had used on the quilt top and a shallow zig zag stitch. It worked well and looks attractive for this sort of quilt but isn’t something I would use on an art quilt or wall hanging.

machine stitched binding