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Still working on the quilt

Today I stitched & turned it with the batting & the backing and did the stitch in the ditch to prep it for free-motion quilting. I used Purple thread from Connecting Threads and I love how it looks.

I used a tip I picked up recently. I used hairspray as basting spray to stick the two layers that weren't getting turned together. Since it was a small quilt & I had an old can of Aquanet hanging around I thought I'd try it and it worked very well. I didn't even have to go outside for better ventilation to use it. I sprayed it on both sides to be sure it stuck and everything went fine. There were no puckers on the back side of my quilt, just on the top that was only pin basted.


Then I looked all over the internet for a quilting motif for the centers of the snowball block and didn't find anything that grabbed me. I settled for the Flame Flower design by Leah Day over at The Free Motion Quilting Project. I sketched it out on paper & my husband was amazed I drew it! I'm not much of a doodler or artist. Then I started Inkscape to layer a drawing of the possible quilting over a picture of my quilt. After finally figuring out how to make the Bezier curve tool work the way I wanted, I had a reasonable facsimile of what I was trying to accomplish. It was OK. Then I noticed the star tool in the toolbar and decided to try that. I created an 8 pointed star and I manipulated the variables to create Spirograph like line drawings.  They came out really awesome so I decided to use 2 in my quilt the first one is for the center Snowball block and the second one is for the 4 outer Snowball blocks.







I have them traced onto tracing paper that I'm going to pin to my top and quilt through, another technique I haven't used before. I'm excited to see if it works. If it does I'll get the deli paper from Sam's that comes in 10 x 10 inch sheets. I've seen comments around the internet that it's good for foundation piecing, string piecing and quilting motifs like Golden Threads paper. I'm so excited to get this finished tomorrow but it may be Monday before it's all said & done. Feel free to take the quilting motifs, they are continuous line.

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The quilt with two names

I've known about this quilt forever. I originally read about it on the Quilting Board way before I'd seen the Jelly Roll Race or the 1600 inch quilt. You can find the original post here: http://www.quiltingboard.com/tutorials-f10/super-fast-jelly-roll-quilt-t44258.html   I recommend you wade through it because there are a lot of nice examples. On page 7 is a picture tutorial and somewhere in there is a discussion of making different sizes and using different widths. She used to have a PDF printout for free but you could just print the first page.  Anyways, I used my JoAnn's, 20 strip jelly roll to try this out.  I wanted to also separate the strips by piecing squares in between them. I really like that look for this quilt so I chose a crazy scrap I had laying around and cut twenty 2 1/2 inch squares. The jelly roll had only ten different fabrics, 2 strips of each, so I pieced squares on one end of each strip. I should clarify, you need to piece strips ...