Thursday, September 5, 2019

Drunkard Path Quilting Closeups

I am still figuring out what fabric to use for the binding of the Drunkard's Path quilt, but  Kyle and Cynthia have asked me to show the quilting of the Drunkard's Path quilt. I am happy to oblige since it will show why took me so long to do it all. 


 The quilt is composed of "rings" around a center circle, shown above. In this circle, I put ovals inside each quarter circle with a sort of ribbon candy design inside each oval.  There is a grid in the center. And outside the oval are fingers. have no idea what to call any of these quilting designs since I just doodled but hopefully the descriptions, along with the picture will make sense.


In this picture, the dark pink on the bottom is the center circle.  I put some zig zag quilting around the dark areas on both sides and surrounded the center circle with petal shapes. I continued the petal shapes all the way up the light areas.


Going out further from the center circle past the light ring is a ring of dark area.  There is a light semicircle that juts into the dark area.  I put a fan shapes in there.  In the dark area, I tried to make these S shape quilting. This was hard to do. It requires a lot of concentration as to which direction you are supposed to be going while figuring out which space needs to be filled.  It wasn't very successful in all the areas, but it is a dark area so I didn't worry too much about going the right way. This ring is the first ring I quilted, and I did each semicircle individually for the most part although I did add some overlap to blend them.

I tried to do all the dark blue areas first, then dark purple to avoid too many thread changes, but once I finished the purple, I decided to just do all the dark areas with the dark purple. Hopefully it adds some consistency to the rings.


This is the first light ring I quilted, and I decided to quilt them in one big section instead of individual blocks to treat it as a big ring. I outlined the dark areas on each side and made these big leaves. In hindsight, I should have treated each half separately - just do one side of the stem and come back to do the other side, but by the time I thought to do that, I had gone so far, I decided to keep doing it that way to be consistent.


Then there is another dark "ring".  It is only in the corners and doesn't go all the way around the quilt.  I quilted these chains on them. I enjoyed making these. I like the design and the area to quilt is much smaller and it is in the corner so it is easy to maneuver.


The final "ring" is the light corner.  I separated this into rows and doodled a design in each row. Each of the corners has these rows, but they don't have the same quilting in each row.  These rows don't go all the way up to the corner  The final quilting has more of those chains going to the corners.  I wanted to make sure I was sewing up towards the corners to keep the fabric smooth.

I trimmed the quilt to the block size for a tutorial I will prepare for you, but as you can see, it is coming up a little bit short and you can see the batting in the corner. The tutorial will show how to fix that.

I will show you the whole quilt after it is bound.

7 comments:

Fiona said...

great texture for your quilt.... I love the feel when it is done..
Hugz

Julierose said...

This is some fancy quilting--lovely finish hugs, Julierose

Cynthia@wabi-sabi-quilts said...

Wow definitely no simple quilting task - you've got such a great variety of pattern! Free motion is so fun to do.

Mrs. Goodneedle said...

Lovely! Yes, I can tell-- this took you a LOT of time; time well-spent, the results are wonderful. Good for you! This quilt is so much fun to look at and study; well done!

Lisa J. said...

That's some fancy quilting you have there. It looks like you had a lot of fun working on this.

Kate said...

Beautiful stitching!

Kim said...

Lovely colour and fabrics in this quilt. Love all the different free motion quilting patterns you imagined. The eyes dance all over this fabulous quilt taking in all the wonderful texture.